Once More With Feeling
by Unstoppable Hanger
Summary: 24-year-old computer programmer is reincarnated as a background character. Her first life was nothing special, but she's determined her second one will be. OC Self-insert.
1. Chapter 1: Death and Rebirth

**A/N: **

**On updates: **I'll probably be posting a new chapter every week or two depending on school commitments.

**On the main character: **Is it still a self-insert if the person you're inserting isn't yourself? While Ami shares a number of characteristics with me, she has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire. Her back-story is also entirely fabricated.

**On listed characters**: Don't read too far into which characters are listed in the fic description. This fic will have a fairly large, diverse cast and I picked those characters kind of arbitrarily.

**On reviews: **I want 'em, you got 'em. Reviews touching on aspects of writing (positively or negatively) are especially appreciated, but all reviews are welcome.

**On pairings**: There will probably be some.

**Disclaimer**: No one owns anything. Edit: My legal counsel has informed me that this is not, in fact, true. My bad.

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**Chapter 1: Death and Rebirth or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Chakra**

Dying was not fun.

You would think I'd have figured that out the first time through, but, well, here I am again. There were a few differences this time. Instead of going to meet the Reaper, this time I would be greeting the Shinigami. I wonder if he will be as forgiving? Somehow I doubt it.

There were other differences, of course. This time my death might actually accomplish something, it might be just enough to…

No. I am doing this all wrong. Starting the story at the end again. Something about imminent death makes it hard to concentrate. I should have plenty of time here though. Finally, now that I can no longer use it.

Get comfortable: my story is not a short one. Nor is it a particularly happy one, though there were some times I wouldn't trade for the world.

Enough of this cryptic bullshit. I'm going to do this right. Begin at the beginning, or maybe a little earlier. Naruto would never forgive me if I told this wrong. So without further ado, here it is: the story of my death, rebirth, life and eventual return to the void.

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My first life was nothing special. I was born to parents, had a brother, went to school, went to more school, got a job, and died at the tender young age of 24 in a way that I will never tell any shinobi because they would never take me seriously again.

It feels weird to look back on my life and call it ordinary, but it was. Like almost everyone on turn-of-the-21st-century Earth I drifted through life (by everyone I mean everyone upper-middle-class in a first-world country). I was smart, everyone told me so, but that almost made it worse. I never had to try very hard for anything so I never did. I am not complaining; I was happy, had friends and was mildly successful at everything I put my hand to. I am just trying to give you a picture of who I was: someone without any grand ambitions and the accompanying spectacular failures or successes.

I do not know why I of all people got reincarnated. Maybe everyone gets a second chance. Hell, it's entirely possible everyone else has already been reincarnated dozens of times but they just keep quiet about it. I certainly wasn't telling anyone.

I still haven't ruled out the possibility that this is all an (incredibly elaborate) hallucination. It makes no difference. I lose nothing by treating it like it is as real as it seems. It would be almost impossible not to, at this point. Perhaps my "first life" was the hallucination. Something to consider in my fleeting free time.

Being born is very disorienting, especially when there is no discontinuity between death and birth. One second I was lying in a hospital, machines beeping around me. The next second I was in a hospital of a very different nature, not that I could tell at the time. A newborn's eyes do not work particularly well and my other senses were not picking up the slack. Everything was so bright, so loud. People—giants—were touching me, lifting me, rocking me.

It was overwhelming and I did the most natural thing: I cried at the top of my lungs.

In my defense, I was not in my right mind. Dying really does a number on your psyche. On top of that, my mind did not seem to be working properly. I cannot even begin to guess at the mechanics of a consciousness being transplanted into a newborn, but I don't think my newborn brain could fully handle it. A software-hardware mismatch, if you would. Add that on to the fact that I had no idea where I was, everything was huge and people were speaking a language I could not understand, and I was a singularly unhappy baby.

Unhappy is an understatement. The trauma, confusion and mental mismatch were too much for me. I withdrew from the world. Dissociation is the technical term, I believe. For the first year of my new life I had only three states: sleeping, inert and crying.

I feel quite sorry for my "parents". They tried everything. They took me to several different medic-nin, all of whom diagnosed me as—physically—perfectly healthy. They tried reading to me, playing music for me, throwing me and catching me. They bought me every toy ever made for a baby. Nothing could get a reaction out of me beyond insensate crying. It's lucky my vocal chords were not developed enough to form words or I might have raised some awkward questions.

I came back to myself shortly after my first birthday.

I awoke one morning to see a young woman leaning over me, a sad look on her face. I tried to open my mouth to ask her where I was and what was happening but my mouth refused to form the syllables and only a burble came out. She started at that and a hopeful look came over her face. She said something in a language that was probably Japanese. I opened my mouth to tell her I didn't understand her when it hit me: all of the past year, the birth, the cradle I was in, my death, my pudgy legs and stubby arms.

My mind nearly broke again, to run gibbering and screaming back into some dark corner of my head, but something stopped me.

I paused on the threshold between sanity and madness, held back by the look of hope that had come over the woman's face. Images sprang unbidden to my mind. The blurry but undeniably happy face of my mother—for that was who she must be—beaming at my father and me as we returned from the hospital. The contentment on her face as she rocked me in her arms and sang me to sleep—or tried to, at least. Her endless patience slowly giving way to tightly controlled despair. The tears she shed over me when she thought I was asleep.

She didn't deserve this. Didn't deserve to have her child, supposed to be a source of pride and happiness, turn to despair and shame. Didn't deserve to hear about little Bobby's first steps and little Alice's (or little Haruto's and Yui's, as the case may be) first word while I lay here inert and inarticulate . Didn't deserve to be responsible for spoon-feeding an inert lump of flesh that she loved desperately despite herself.

I looked her deliberately in the eyes, put my lips together and happily burbled "Mama".

Never have two syllables caused so much joy. After a short celebration, she returned me to my crib and went to find her husband.

It was lucky that 'mama' as a word babies use for their mothers is almost universal among cultures (a result of 'a' being the easiest vowel sound to make and 'm' being the easiest consonant to make while breastfeeding). She probably would have been happy with any sign of sentience at this point, but I have always had a flair for the dramatic.

Left alone now, I needed to confront where I was. Hard as it was for me to believe, I recognized the hitai-ate on my parents' heads. My blurry memories of being carried outside had the Hokage monument in the background. I was in Konoha. This was the Narutoverse.

That was actually easier to accept that I thought it would be. The existence of reincarnation had already destroyed my worldview enough that it didn't seem like that much more of a stretch that I end up inside a piece of media. If you're going to live again after death, why not do it in the world of a manga?

The Hokage monument had had four faces on it, placing me somewhere between a couple years pre-Kyuubi attack and the time-skip. That meant things were going to get very hectic pretty soon. I had some important decisions to make, but I needed more information to make them.

I heard two voices approaching speaking excitedly, so I set aside my ruminations, put on my happy face and dusted off my acting skills.

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Being a baby is incredibly boring. I'm not sure how babies stand it. I've heard people wax poetical about how nice babies have it, with no responsibilities, nothing they have to do, and the ability to laze around all day. I may have had some very lazy friends. Regardless, they are wrong. Babies have nothing they _can_ do and they _have to_ laze around all day.

I was actually really thankful that the local language wasn't English. Without the intellectual stimulation of learning a new language, I'm not sure I would've made it through my second year without cracking and revealing myself for the adult I was. Starved as I was for things to do, I almost did anyway. Instead, I "learned to speak" far more quickly than any child would or could have. By my second birthday I was talking in full sentences and performed basic abstract reasoning.

I considered holding back but decided against it for several reasons. Firstly, I wasn't sure I would be able to keep up the act. If a ninja told their two-year-old daughter not to touch hot things because they'll burn her and she unthinkingly responded "thanks for the tip, Captain Obvious", they'd be a somewhat surprised. If she were already talking like a sapient being, they might smile and shake their head at her precociousness. If, on the other hand, the most complicated thought she had previously expressed was "Mama gimme food" they would probably start checking her for mind switch jutsu.

Additionally, I wasn't that worried about seeming impossibly prodigious. Kakashi had attended the academy when he was four and _finished in one year at the top of his class_. The developmental guidelines my parents had cared so much about when raising my brother didn't seem to apply to ninjas at all. In fact, depending on when exactly this was, I might need to be seen as a "prodigy". If Oto and Suna were going to attack Konoha when I was five, I would much rather be a ninja-in-training than a civilian child who could only run and hide. At the very least if I had ninja skills I could run and hide much more effectively.

Those specific fears were allayed when, shortly after my second birthday, I overheard my parents discussing the cohort of clan heirs that were my age, wondering if I would be able to ingratiate myself to them, perhaps at the academy. They didn't say it in so many words of course, but that was the gist of it. I didn't judge them for it; from what I'd gathered opportunities for advancement in the ninja world that didn't involve exceptional skills or a high probability of grievous bodily harm were few and far between.

Now I had a choice to make as to the path my life would take. There were really three options for me that I could see. The first would be to aim for a civilian life and to elope (in the non-marriage sense) to the countryside before all the insanity hit Konoha. This had some obvious downsides. The Narutoverse was not a particularly happy place for most non-ninjas from what I had gathered: quality of life comparable to that of feudal Japan, with the addition of a truly ludicrous number of bandits and the occasional superhumanly powerful murderous psychopath.

That would have still been a possibility worth considering were it not for the fact that it would have meant abandoning my new parents. They would never leave the village in its hour of need, and I had grown to love them deeply. If children were conscious of all their parents did for them in the first few years of their life there would be way less strife between them and their parents. It is impossible for anyone with the slightest shred of empathy to see the devotion of their parents and recognize the sacrifices their parents make for them and not care for their parents in turn. Impossible to feel that unconditional love and not return it.

Which meant that I essentially had no choice but to become a ninja. As a ninja though I had two options: I could join the rank and file, keep my head down, change as little as possible and hope for the best. Or I could throw myself into the middle of things, try to get onto one of the Rookie Nine teams and use my foreknowledge to ensure things came out for the best.

Sounds like it should be an easy decision, but it really wasn't.

I know everything (for the most part) worked out in the canon storyline. Sure, a lot of people died and it would be nice if that could be avoided, but all the existential threats were dealt with. For obvious reasons, I didn't want to mess that up. That being said, I probably already had. However small a difference my presence had made, the things I was talking about were years down the road; by then the ripples would have spread far indeed.

People underestimate the power of the "butterfly effect". There are lots of science fiction stories where someone gets sent back in time and steps on a prehistoric insect. Then when they return to the modern day their job is different or their wife is dead or there's been some other change which might be huge for them but is laughably insignificant on the scale of the world.

If you went back to the Mesozoic era for a split second and did nothing but displace air with your presence, the face of the world would be completely different. Every person ever born would be different from who they were originally, if humanity as a species even evolved the second time around. Even leaving aside the fickle nature of decision-making minds, meteorology and genetics are both so chaotic, able to be influenced by the movement of a few molecules, that small changes make huge ones years later. When it came to fights between ninja, where a split second makes the difference between dodging and taking a kunai in the eye, I would not expect things to go at all the same.

But I digress. The point is that I could not count on things going the same way just because I didn't get actively involved in them. Which left the question of whether or not my active involvement would positively or negatively influence their outcome. I wanted to say positively, but that would require me to not be a liability. I would need to become strong. Really strong. Impossibly strong. The kind of strength that manifested itself maybe ten times in a generation. And I would have to do it without out the advantage of clan techniques, bloodlines, tailed beasts or dōjutsu.

I didn't know if I could do it. For perhaps the first time in my life, I was standing on the precipice of a task that I wasn't sure I could complete. I have always had a fairly elevated view of my own abilities, the inevitable consequence of never having failed at something I tried, but this…this would require hard work and determination the likes of which I could barely imagine. It is one thing to have the will to sacrifice yourself, to make the grand gestures, to push yourself to the limit in the moment. I think I could do that if I had to. It's quite another to work yourself to the bone training every hour of every day, burdened by secrets you can't share with anyone with only the nebulous threat of future danger for motivation.

Besides, all that would do would get me to the place where I could be useful in a fight, where I would then need to make the grand gestures. The fights themselves would take more from me than I'd ever had to give before.

I didn't know if I had it in me.

There were other ways I could be useful aside from fighting, of course. I'm not very confident in my foreknowledge (see above) but it would provide approximate outlines of the future that might help. My _knowledge_ on the other hand would be incredibly useful. I know that Orochimaru was starting his own ninja village. I know that Obito is still alive. I know about Akatsuki. I know what Black Zetsu really is.

Problem is, in the ninja world power _was_ authority. Kage was used to mean both political head of a village and the highest power class. To be in a position to capitalize on much of my knowledge I would first need to establish myself as a competent ninja and a master of tactics (or possibly espionage).

Also, the events of the manga looked at through the lens of the real world were just so…implausible. The important characters face a series of opponents that they manage to beat by the skin of their teeth. After each one they heal up, train for a bit, become much stronger when a new threat appears that they once again just barely manage to beat. On top of that, despite several times fighting people who were _way _out of their weight class, almost every main character made it through every fight without even serious injury. Ridiculous.

I'm not trying to disparage the Naruto manga, that's just how action media work. Without an omnipotent writer looking over the main characters' shoulders ensuring that everything would work out in the end most action heroes' stories would end pretty quickly. I had to assume that wouldn't be the case this time. If there is someone writing what happens here then it doesn't really matter what I pick, I'm sure whatever is most dramatically satisfying will happen anyway.

On top of that…I have always wanted to be special. I know that I am by no means unique in this (and yes, I realize the irony of that), but that doesn't change it. I always felt like I could be great (in the classical sense) if only I had the opportunity. And here it was: you can't get a much grander ambition than saving the world, or at least helping to do so.

That was years down the road, though, with dozens if not hundreds of fights and challenges between then and now. There was lots to do to prepare. I would start small. Baby steps, if you would. The first step to becoming a great kunoichi would begin with sticking a leaf to my forehead.

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I really hoped the zeroth step to becoming a great kunoichi was having a leaf fall off your forehead, because I was getting quite adept at that.

It had been almost two years since my grand resolution and I had instituted a training regimen of sorts. The presence of my parents hindered it somewhat, as did my annoying need to sleep thirteen hours a day. Still, I spent as much time as I could "training".

I say training with quotation marks because there really wasn't that much I could do at that age. I was wary of strength training, as I knew that (back on old chakra-less Earth) doing so at a young age stunted your growth and could have other deleterious effects. I figured chakra mitigated that to some extent, given how intensely the child prodigies of Naruto were depicted as training, but I didn't want to risk it too early. I would've liked to have kunai or shuriken to practice throwing, but I didn't think my parents would be too enthusiastic about that idea and I didn't know where else I could get some. I considered trying to recover some from the training grounds, but feared the repercussions if I were caught with them.

Let it never be said that ninja coddled their children. I spent hours every day outside "playing" alone, even at that age. Independence and initiative were highly valued and were extolled to young ninja at every opportunity. Still, my parents would probably draw the line at giving me the tools that could get someone—or myself—killed or seriously injured.

So I did what I could without tools. I threw rocks at bottles, slowly increasing the distance as my aim improved. I walked along the top of the thin, foot-high wall that surrounded our garden, first with hands out for balance, then with hands in pockets, then while balancing a cup of water on my head. I taught myself to juggle and to cartwheel. I dropped things with one hand and caught them with the other. I spent hours stretching, contorting myself into shapes I would not have thought possible as a slightly-out-of-shape 24-year-old.

Balance, reflexes, hand-eye-coordination, flexibility. Everything I thought I would need as a ninja I practiced to excess. I sometimes felt like I was trying out for the circus. I improved quickly, though I had no idea how I compared against the naturally gifted.

My parents were somewhat bemused by my activities. I intentionally cultivated the personality of a perfectionist. It wasn't that I thought it was really important to be able to _balance on one foot while catching leaves_ flawlessly, it was important that I be able to balance on one foot while catching leaves _flawlessly. _I could always have come clean about the fact that I was practicing to be a ninja. I'm sure my parents would have been delighted. Easy though that would've made things, I couldn't. I was desperate to avoid early entrance into the academy.

My childhood was a period of rare peace for Konoha. Tensions with Cloud were still high after the Hyūga affair, but overt hostilities had stopped. Children were now being allowed to have childhoods, instead of being sent off to war as soon as they possibly could be. It was rare for even prodigies to be allowed to finish the academy in a year or two, like Kakashi and Itachi had, but early admittance and grade-skipping still happened pretty frequently. I couldn't let that happen to me. By far the most effective place for me to be would be as one of the Konoha Nine, Team Seven in particular. That meant even a single grade-skip could be disastrous.

Not that that seemed likely anyway unless I could figure out how to get my chakra to work. Over the past two years I had spent hundreds of hours meditating, trying to feel and manipulate my chakra. Over time I got the sense of…something inside of me. The exact feeling that chakra has is very hard to describe.

It's kind of like the feeling of a warm drink on a very cold day, the way it heats you up, revitalizes you and spreads throughout your body. But that's not quite right…

It's kind of like the feeling you get when you touch a Van de Graaff generator, your whole body tingles and all your hair stands on end. But that's not quite right either…

It's kind of like the feeling of sunlight on your face, of wind in your hair and of earth between your toes. But none of those really do it justice…

There's nothing quite like it. It's chakra. It is. And it. Feels. _Fantastic_.

I don't know how any ninja were ever unhappy with chakra inside them. I could only imagine they got desensitized to it eventually. That would explain why ninja children were always so happy and full of life and why chakra exhaustion was so dreaded.

For me chakra was also a source of endless frustration. Despite feeling it inside of me, I still couldn't use it for anything external. Sure, I felt it whenever I did anything physical, pumping through my muscles, giving me that extra little push. I also felt it dwindling whenever I pushed myself for an extended period. After the time I tried to run around my whole neighborhood and almost fainted from exhaustion I couldn't feel my chakra for hours.

I could move it around inside me and, after endless hours of practice, could deliberately use it to reinforce certain muscles (to a greater degree than I was doing instinctively). It took me several minutes of stillness and meditation and with it I was only able to lift a rock that weighed all of ten pounds, but I barely weighed thirty myself and considered it a huge accomplishment. It left me smiling the rest of the day. When my parents asked me why I was smiling, I told them I was smiling all day as part of an experiment to see if I smiled because I was happy or if smiling _made_ me happy. Kind of an unnecessarily complicated lie, but dissembling had become second nature to me by that point, and I had actually spent a day like that in my past life.

Somehow lifting that rock was what made everything seem real. Until that day I'd felt almost like I would wake-up at any second back at my apartment to find out I had slept in and was late for work. After that small but nonetheless impossible-without-chakra feat I really, finally, fully realized that I wasn't in Kansas anymore. As this non-Kansas was not a very friendly place, that only made me redouble my efforts.

Which made it all the more annoying that this damn leaf refused to stick to my forehead.

I was sitting in the backyard of my parent's two-person apartment. It was relatively small—my mother had only just made chunin and my father was still in the Genin Corps—but it was large enough for my purposes. The sun and the wind and the earth calmed me and made me feel closer to nature which seemed to help me reach my chakra. I was sitting in the lotus position, eyes closed. I doubted the crossed legs and bent wrists had any intrinsic chakra-channeling properties, but if felt like it should help so it did.

I took a deep breath and prepared to try again. Attempt number one-thousand seven hundred and something. Just because every other time had failed didn't mean this one would. Right? Right?

I shut down that thought before it got out of hand. From what little I'd been able to find about chakra manipulation in the civilian library expectation, will and intent were crucial to the effective molding of chakra. If you thought you were going to fail, you probably would.

I sat for a couple minutes, feeling the ebb and flow of the chakra inside me, slowly gathering it in my forehead. I lifted a leaf to my forehead with the solemnity of a funeral procession and the reverence of a catholic holding the pope's pointy hat. I held it there, willing my chakra to reach out and grab it, expecting it to stay there despite gravity's best efforts.

I took my hand away slowly, tentatively, trying not to disturb the delicate web my chakra was (in theory) weaving. I lifted my hand away and the leaf stayed where it was. For about a second, until the wind stopped blowing towards me.

I scowled and bit back a curse. This wasn't working. I wasn't making any progress by myself and the day of my entrance into the academy was rapidly approaching. I'd hoped to already have the basics of the academy jutsu by then. I wasn't particularly worried about the entrance exam. I was sure I could score well enough on the intellect-based parts to make up for any physical shortcomings. Still, it was one of the large milestones of a young ninja's life, and I'd hoped to be much further along by then.

Perhaps I was old enough now that I could ask my parents about chakra without raising too many flags. Sasuke was able to learn the Great Fireball technique when he was seven and he still went through the academy the slow way.

I found my parents sitting together in the kitchen/dining room/living room (when your house only has four rooms, you get creative with their layout). Mom was sewing up a rip in her flak jacket and Dad was putting the finishing touches on a mission report. They were in their early twenties, a little on the old side for shinobi parents with a small child. Life expectancy as it was for shinobi, most of them did not wait for children.

They smiled as I entered, looking up from their respective pieces of work.

"That was fast," said Dad "I don't think I've ever seen you spend less than an hour meditating once you've gotten going."

"Not by choice, at least," added Mom. They shared a smile, probably thinking of the tantrum I'd thrown the time they'd interrupted me when I was on the cusp of figuring out chakra muscle enhancement.

"I didn't know meditation was something you could 'get going' at" I said, adding my smile to theirs. "Mom, Dad, how do you use chakra?"

My parents looked at each other, as if trying to decide who would tackle this one. Dad nodded and Mom asked "Who told you about chakra?"

"Well, Fuki's brother just became a genin and she said he just learned how to walk up trees using something called chakra which sounded like fun and I wanted to try it but she said that he said that first you had to learn how to get a leaf to stick to you so I tried that but it kept falling off and I want to walk up a tree so how do you use chakra?" I spoke with as much excitement as I could muster and told my convoluted story in one breath. I didn't want to have to worry too much that what I said was too complicated for children of my age, so I had tried to adopt the mannerisms of a child. Even if the message weren't childish, at least the medium could be. Excitability and a tendency to ramble were things I had enough of as an adult that I could pretty easily exaggerate them here.

The story was a complete fabrication, of course. Fuki was another neighborhood kid around my age and she did have a brother who had recently graduated, so it would probably check out, but I hadn't spoken to her in months. I didn't speak much to the other children. I didn't really know how to interact with them. I hadn't been a particularly sociable four-year-old the first time through and the intervening twenty-four years hadn't really taught me any better. I'm not sure it would've worked out anyway. The kids found me strange and I found them boring. My tendency for loquaciousness and disinterest in their schoolyard squabbles marked me as an outsider. Kids like to ostracize anyone who is different, so I saved them the trouble by not giving them the chance. If I'd had the opportunity to make inroads with any of the people who would end up being important (Sasuke, Hinata, Shikamaru, etc…) I would have made the effort, but from what I could tell the kids in my neighborhood weren't worth the time or energy.

I'd considered telling my parents I'd read about chakra in a book, but they were somewhat misinformed about my reading proficiency and I didn't want to get sidetracked on a discussion about that. Besides, the civilian library—the only one I'd have access to until I'd enrolled at the academy—had very little information on anything ninja-related. There were plenty of fanciful tales but almost no hard info. The most useful thing I'd been able to find (aside from the hint I'd already mentioned, which may or may not be true) was a chart of hand seals which I'd laboriously traced and practiced off of whenever my parents weren't looking. The hand seals wouldn't do anything without chakra behind them though, which brought us back to the matter at hand.

"To use chakra you first need to be able to manipulate the chakra inside you," Mom said. "Once you can do that, you move it out through your tenketsu, that means chakra points, and, depending on what you're trying to do, either use hand seals to shape it or force it to do what you want with your will."

"OK!" I said brightly. "You're a sensor, right? Can you watch me and see if I'm doing it right?"

"Sure, honey." She smiled tolerantly at me, probably not expecting anything to happen. She placed one hand on my shoulder.

I didn't really want to show how good I was at manipulating my chakra, but I'd hit a dead end and I really needed to figure out why I couldn't do anything external. I closed my eyes and began to gather my chakra but was interrupted by Mom's voice.

"Huh, that's weird. I can feel your chakra inside you but your tenketsu feel strange. We need to see someone about this."

A short visit to the medic-nin later saw us referred to the Hyūga compound. One of the Hyūga came out, prodded me a couple times, declared me cured and sent us on our merry way. Dad was waiting for us when we got back home.

"Get everything sorted out?" he asked.

"Yeah. The medic-nin said her tenketsu were partially blocked, which would've prevented her from using her chakra externally."

"He say what could've caused that?"

"Said it was sometimes caused by intense mental trauma." Mom frowned. "I wonder what could've possibly…"

I didn't like where this was going. "Maybe…I was just born that way?" I said. I perked up as if I'd just had an idea. "Maybe that's why I was such an unhappy baby?"

"Could be…"

She didn't seem convinced, but I didn't want her or Dad to dwell on this too much further. A subject change was in order.

"Mom, what were those symbols the medic drew before he looked at me?"

Mom opened her mouth, maybe to answer, maybe to talk more about my condition, but Dad turned to her and spoke first.

"You took her somewhere she'd never been before? Showed her something she'd never seen before? Are you mad, woman?" The horror in his voice unsettled me until I noticed the playful look on his face. "Now we won't get any peace for a week!"

He winked at me and almost missed the pen I threw at his face. He caught it at the last second and held it reverently in front of him. "The wise Hibari-sama has blessed me with a gift! I shall examine it carefully, for it surely contains all the secrets of the world!"

Hibari-chan was one his pet names for me. The hibari was a type of bird whose whoop-chirp call sounded a lot like 'nan de', the Japanese word for 'how' or 'why'. I had a…slight…propensity for asking questions about every single thing I saw every chance I got, a trait my parents happily indulged and Dad found hilarious.

One day after I'd spent an hour grilling him about the structure of the village's council system he told Mom that 'nan de' was clearly the only word I knew and asked her if she'd cuckolded him with a hibari. I don't think I was supposed to understand that part so I put on a confused look and asked him what a hibari was. After he'd finished laughing he ruffled my hair and said "You are, my hibari-chan". Since then it was what he called me whenever my inquisitive side came out.

I looked at him with wide, hopeful eyes. "Really? Does that mean you can now answer all the questions in the the world? There are so many I want to ask. How did…" It wasn't the diversion I'd been aiming for, but Mom joined in our banter and the mystery of my mental trauma was soon forgotten.

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After that my leaf sticking was far more successful, which is to say I had slight successes with it. I still struggled greatly, but after months with every spare moment spent with a leaf stuck to my forehead I was able to keep it there consistently.

I could only maintain it for an hour or so before I ran out of chakra, so I practiced reducing the amount of chakra to a trickle, until the leaf was about to fall off. I would then hold it at that bare minimum level for as long as possible.

I also started experimenting with other materials and other places on my body. Alternating sticking and repulsing my clothes was a convenient exercise, as it was something I could do pretty much anywhere anytime without drawing too much attention to myself. I got into the habit of sticking bits of paper to myself and maintaining it as I went about my day. At first I could only handle one stuck to my hand. It still fell off whenever I got distracted, but over time I got better and better at it. Soon enough I could hold it in place while I ran, jumped and did cartwheels. So I added another piece and was right back to square one.

By the time my enrollment at the academy came around I was keeping three bits of paper on me almost all the time. I really wanted to practice tree walking, but I didn't have the chakra reserves; the few times I'd tried I'd exhausted myself within minutes.

Describing that portion of my life in a couple hundred words like this really doesn't do it justice. Even now, looking back on the entirety of my life, that still might have been the hardest time I've ever had. The effort involved in manipulating chakra before you're proficient at it is almost impossible to describe to someone who's never experienced it. It is mind-numbing, figurative-back-breaking work.

Imagine doing the hardest math problem you've ever encountered while simultaneously carrying on a conversation. Now imagine the conversation is in a language you barely speak and your conversational partner has a heavy accent. Now imagine all the numbers in your math problem are in roman numerals. And you're working on a strict time-limit and if you make a single math error or misspeak at all you'll fail. And that once you've failed it will be even harder to succeed a second time. And someone is playing loud, off-key, off-tempo accordion music in your ear. And you're upside down.

Now you might have some small idea of the mental effort involved. Maybe it's easier for everyone else, as chakra is there while their mind develops. Maybe it was only so hard for me because I needed to create new paths of thought in a mind that had long since become set in its ways. I certainly hope that's the case. I wouldn't wish even a much milder, more drawn out version of what I went through on anyone.

I frequently drove myself to chakra exhaustion. I was always careful to stop when I felt the well within me dry up; I remembered mentions in the manga of people dying from chakra exhaustion, and I certainly didn't want to die before I got a chance to actually apply my hard-earned skills to anything. Nonetheless, it is one of the most uncomfortable feelings I have ever felt.

What I said before about becoming accustomed to the good feelings chakra gives you was very true. I'd stopped realizing it, but it was always there. It gave me energy, eased my pains and was a balm for my bad moods. Its absence was supremely uncomfortable. In my past life I had, shall we say, dabbled in the pharmaceutical arts, and experienced my fair share of hard crashes and harsh withdrawals. None of that compared, especially not when you took into account the regular exhaustion and chronic vomiting chakra exhaustion brought along for the ride.

I almost quit. In fact, I almost quit almost every day. The only things that kept me going were my parents. Every time I faltered, every time my will flagged, I saw them crushed under Shukaku's sand. Obliterated by Pain's Shinra Tensei. Turned into White Zetsus by the Infinite Tsukiyomi. The whole "precious people make you strong" thing had always seemed a little hokey to me, but now I saw the truth of it. For their sake I would become as strong as I needed to be. I may not have had much chakra, but I'd be damned if I weren't going to use it as efficiently as I possibly could.

Tomorrow I would be going to the academy, finally making my entrance into the ninja world. I could hardly wait.

Oh. I should probably also mention who I actually am. I thought at first that I had just been born to random parents who had not had children in the canon storyline, but it turns out that's not actually true. I didn't want to believe it when I first figured it out but between my age, my name—Ami—and my hair color—purple—it was pretty undeniable. I was one of the bullies from the main character's academy days. I was a bit character who had only appeared in a flashback. A flashback!

Well, this time through we'd see just how important a bit character could be.

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><p>.<p>

_Wow, that ending was actually a lot more ominous than I had intended. I swear Ami isn't evil or crazy, she's just excited. Tone might be a little inconsistent as I haven't fully figured out Ami's character and voice yet._

_Let me know if you see any typos or grammatical errors and I'll correct them. Normally I'd take the snooty route and say any non-typo-induced grammatical "errors" were probably stylistic choices, but I changed which tense I wrote this chapter in half-way through and I'm not positive I fixed everything I needed to._

_The theme of this chapter was time passing and you being told about it. The theme of next chapter is things actually happening, though this chapter's theme will still be an important motif. If I'm feeling frisky when I write it two or more characters might even interact with each other!_

_Hibari is the Japanese word for skylark. I have no idea what the song of the skylark actually sounds like, but I sincerely doubt it says nan de, so we'll just say the Narutoverse has a type of bird in it that has the same name as the skylark despite being completely different._

_Yes, I know that the pope's pointy hat is called a mitre, but that just doesn't have the same ring to it. Pope's pointy hat. Tragically, "Pope's NOGOOGLENO mitre" (without the NOGOOGLENO in the middle) has over three times as many Google hits as "Pope's pointy hat". The true purpose of writing this fic was to do my small part to right this grievous wrong._

_The medic-nin Ami saw as a child not noticing the problem with her tenketsu is not a plot hole, by which I mean I have thought up a plausible-sounding explanation for it: the blockage was only visible once her chakra system was more developed, as a newborn's chakra system is too faint to detect.  
><em>


	2. Chapter 2: Ninja Academy

**A/N: **

**On pedantry: **So I guess I should point out—since it has been pointed out to me several times—that very technically Ami is not an OC since she does appear in the original manga. That being said, her personality is completely divorced from the canon one (and her first life is original), so I will probably continue to refer to her as an OC.

**On Character Tags: **I also found out that FFnet actually has a character tag for Ami, which I never even looked for when originally posting this fic and completely boggles the mind, since she appears in all of 6 panels.

**On Chapter Lengths: **I've decided to post somewhat shorter chapters than chapter 1 was. Two reasons for this. Firstly, FFnet's default behavior of sorting by publish date vastly incentivizes more frequent, shorter updates. Secondly, the few polls I was able to find about preferred chapter length found that 3-4k words was what most people preferred, so that's roughly what I'll be aiming for. I will go outside that range if it makes sense for a chapter, of course, if there are no natural breakpoints in the appropriate places.

**Disclaimer:** Every Kishimoto is an opportunity in disguise.

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><p>.<p>

**Chapter 2: How to Win Friends and Influence Ninja  
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The academy was not what I'd expected. I'd been so focused on the fact that it was a _ninja _school that I had forgotten that it was a ninja _school_. Don't get me wrong: I loved schooling. I'd spent almost all of my past life at school, only leaving it once I'd run out of degrees I could pursue. However, that did not mean I was excited to spend another seven years learning to count and spell alongside a bunch of ankle-biters.

A lot of our time was spent on elementary subjects: history, geography, basic numeracy and literacy. The history and geography were novel and interesting to me, even if they were presented rather simplistically. The kindergarten-level math and reading were somewhat less stimulating. Instead of focusing on the lessons, I spent a lot of time studying a subject not on the curriculum: my peers. While they watched Iruka, I watched them.

Having solid relationships with the ninja of my age group would be really important. It was likely that at some point I would need to get them to act on my word alone. Given the suspicious nature of—most—shinobi, that would probably require deep trust, the kind that could only be built through years of friendship or teamwork. I was terrified of screwing up, of making a misstep that would lower me in their eyes or insult them somehow.

I'd never actively set out to befriend someone before. I'd had friends in my previous life, sure, but they were mostly friends of friends that I'd appropriated somehow. The original friends who started the whole chain had just been people circumstances had thrown me together with—a classmate, a coworker—who had decided they liked me for whatever reason.

That approach would not work here. It had only worked before because of the number of people I ran into in an average day. Meet enough people and eventually you'd find some who like you regardless of how peculiar or asocial you were. I didn't have that luxury. I needed to connect with nine specific, and very different, people, all of whom knew each other and had complex interpersonal relationships. It didn't help that they were all five or six years old, an age I had little conception of how to relate to, and were at varying levels of intellectual development. I found myself regretting my disdain for the children who'd grown up around me. That practice socializing would have really helped here.

So I observed, hoping I could figure out what made each person tick. I had a general idea of their personalities from the manga of course, but that was mostly with respect to how they would react in a high-stress situation. Those were few and far between at the academy, unless you included trying to carry on a conversation with Naruto or Kiba. I was also unsure how much of the personalities they'd shown later on would manifest this early. Some of the defining features of the academy-aged ninja from the manga were lacking, such as Ino's and Sakura's Sasuke obsessions (something I imagined would emerge around puberty).

I observed them and I planned. I soon had them split into three groups.

Hinata and Naruto were both so starved for companionship that I wasn't really worried about them. Not about befriending them, at least. I did worry about their mental health somewhat; a lack of confidence that severe could not be healthy, nor could the abuse Naruto dealt with daily. I could easily see his drive for recognition getting him killed at some point. That and Hinata's shyness were hopefully things I could work on once I knew them better. Hinata would almost certainly befriend anyone who had the persistence to get past her prim and proper facade. Naruto would probably latch onto anyone who treated him like a person instead of a skunk. I considered befriending them as soon as I'd come to that conclusion, but I feared associating with them first would ruin my chances with the rest, pariahs that they were.

Kiba, Shino and Sasuke would each take an individual, personalized approach. They weren't close to anyone at the academy but, unlike Naruto and Hinata, seemed to prefer it that way. Kiba had Akamaru, Shino seemed far more interested in insects than people and Sasuke had his brother.

Kiba was incredibly full of energy. He had difficulty sitting still for more than ten minutes at a time. Any time Iruka tried to get us to concentrate on any one task for too long, Kiba would inevitably act out in some way. Loud "jokes", and I mean that in the loosest sense of the word, and picking fights with Naruto were two of his specialties. I never once saw him without Akamaru at his side. He shared some mannerisms with his ninken; he could frequently be seen fiddling with a piece of paper (usually our assignments or handouts) until he'd torn it to shreds (something that Iruka greatly appreciated, I can assure you), while Akamaru lay beside him worrying a bone.

In fact, it soon became clear to me that Kiba's social dynamics were closer to a dog's than a human's. Staring at him for more than a second or two was a sure way to provoke a fight with him. Iruka had been placed in a position of authority over Kiba, but he'd never actually established that authority, so Kiba tested it. Every time Iruka did not put Kiba in his place he invited further acts of defiance. Sure, he yelled at Kiba but, soft-hearted as he was, he never followed through on any of his threats. All bark and no bite, if you would.

That also explained why Kiba had such a hard time with Naruto. Despite Naruto being (in Kiba's mind) inferior to him in every way, Naruto never backed down when challenged. To make matters worse, Naruto tried to fill a similar social niche to Kiba's own. Infringed upon his territory. I foresaw a headache-inducing seven years at the academy with the two of them together.

I saw two possible avenues for approaching Kiba. The first would be to establish myself as firmly above him, but I wasn't sure how to do that without appearing overly aggressive or vindictive to the other children, something that would hinder my relationships with them. The second was by befriending Akamaru. He was a lot less prickly than his master and could likely be won over by a combination of treats and tummy scratches. That would still require some caution; Kiba was very protective of those he saw as his pack and lashed out violently against threats and slights (real or perceived) towards them.

I had a hard time reading Shino. He was standoffish and only seemed to participate in conversations to nitpick what others had said. His high collar and constant sunglasses did not help matters. He was studious and analytical but was easily offended. I had some idea of what not to do when talking to him—avoid being brash or impulsive, don't insult him or his clan and, for the love of Kami, do not step on any ants. The only idea I had for making an impression on him was to do the opposite of the things that annoyed him: speak precisely, nitpick, praise him or his clan, show an interest in insects.

Sasuke was a huge surprise for me. I had known that his personality was different pre-Uchiha massacre, but I hadn't realized the extent. He was kind and unfailingly polite. I never heard him say a bad word about anybody. He was respectful to the teachers and every Uchiha I saw him interact with. To hear him discuss the clan elders you would think them gods made flesh.

Through his kind demeanor I could see the seeds that, watered by trauma, would grow into the hard-hearted shinobi of the manga. His reserve coupled with the loss of everything he knew and loved would become coldness towards what remained of the world. His pursuit of perfection in every activity coupled with burning hatred would become all-consuming obsession. His regard for his clan and belief in their inherent superiority coupled with their loss would become unmatched arrogance.

His belief in his clan's superiority was interesting. It was not—yet—arrogance. From him it was not a boast or pretension; it was simply the way of the world. He seemed almost apologetic about it. When someone said or implied differently he seemed confused, as if they had instead told him the sun had risen in the West that morning, or that an Akimichi had turned down food.

Of everyone he was the one I spent the most time observing. He would be one of the hardest to connect to but was undeniably the most important. Getting close to him before the massacre would be much easier than it would be afterward, and being there for him while he dealt with the trauma might prevent the worst of his psychological damage. Strengthening his ties to Konoha might even prevent his defection, which would make a lot of what followed much easier.

I still hadn't given up on the idea of preventing the Uchiha massacre, but I did not give myself a high probability of success. I had nowhere near the power or reach to effect any changes myself yet. My only hope was that I could, through Sasuke, meet Itachi or possibly Shisui, and that a few innocuous-sounding words at the right time might have far-reaching consequences. If I could somehow convince Shisui to confide in Itachi, or vice versa, and put the two of them on guard towards Danzo, disaster might still be averted.

All that would first require getting close to Sasuke, which brought me back to the original problem. One of the ways I could most easily connect with him—commiserate over a demanding, impossible to please father—wouldn't even require lying or misrepresenting myself. Unfortunately, that father was a world away and few would believe the same of the laid-back genin I'd grown up with here. Aside from that, the only way I could see of connecting with him would be convincing him I had something to offer as a training partner. That was what he spent most of his time on anyway, though he didn't do it with quite the intensity he showed post-massacre.

Which left Chouji, Shikamaru, Sakura and Ino. I grouped them together because of how close they were. Chouji and Shikamaru were rarely seen apart and Ino was very frequently with them, despite Shikamaru's grumblings about troublesome women. Sakura and Ino hadn't gotten chummy yet, but given their similarities I found it unlikely that would continue for much longer.

Chouji seemed like a decent guy, if a little simplistic. His psyche was the only one I might have called normal for a six year old of the boys I'd observed here. He was never seen without some sort of snack in his hand. From what I knew of the Akimichi techniques large amounts of body mass were necessary to perform a lot of their jutsu. It was lucky he seemed to enjoy eating, or his life might not have been very fun.

Shikamaru was exactly what I expected: lazy, loyal, terrified of the women in his life. Terrified is perhaps too strong: discomfited might be more accurate. I sometimes caught him watching me watch everyone else, but I had no idea what he made of my observational habits. I was somewhat worried that he would notice the calculated nature of my social outreaches. I knew he was a genius, even if he never showed it. In hindsight it was a kind of silly fear: upon seeing someone attempting to make friends, no matter how deliberately they do it, it is the rare individual that would conclude conspiracy over loneliness. At the very worst he would've thought that I was just trying to ingratiate myself to the future clan heads, and I really doubt he would've cared about that.

I had only begun to try to figure out Sakura and Ino, and had absolutely no idea how to approach the whole group, when it was all taken out of my hands.

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><p>.<p>

About two months after we'd enrolled in the academy, my female classmates and I began attending special kunoichi classes. There, we would learn about other cultures and some of the pastimes of civilian women, such as flower arrangement. The boys had their own class, where they would learn about such manly pursuits as…farming? Gambling? I actually had no idea what civilian men did for fun in this world. At first I found it strange that we were segregated but it quickly became clear that gender equality in the "Five Great Nations" was somewhat less progressive than it was in Konoha.

The existence of kunoichi made it essentially impossible for that kind of systematic oppression. There were simply too many women who were too powerful and would refuse to stand for it. I certainly wouldn't want to be the one to tell Tsunade she was a second-class citizen. Civilian culture seemed to be more medieval in its expectations of women. That was something I planned to work on once I'd finished with this whole turn-everyone-in-the-world-into-mindless-plant-people silliness. For now, it meant that we had to learn separately from the boys, as the roles they would be expected to fill in infiltration missions were completely different from ours.

We had been sent out to gather flowers, told to create an arrangement in the Chabana style. I had absolutely no idea what that meant. Apparently we were already supposed to understand the basics of Ikebana, and the class was only to catch our mistakes and refine our skills. This was a problem for me, as I currently had no skills at all pertaining to flower arrangement. Mom had tried to teach it to me a few times, but I found it kind of silly and boring. I have a pretty fantastic memory for things that interest me, but flower arrangement was pretty far from being one of those things, and Mom's words had gone in one ear and out the other. I hadn't realized it was something I'd be expected to know to complete the academy. I had figured if I had to masquerade as a civilian I could always claim an allergy to pollen sadly prevented me from engaging in "the noble art". The only thing I remembered her saying about Ikebana was that it was supposed to be done in silence as a way of connecting with and appreciating nature. The laughter and yells I could hear from the other children made it obvious that that rule wasn't in effect here, so I was left with basically nothing.

I couldn't use the time to make a Chabana arrangement, having no idea what that actually entailed, so I walked around picking flowers randomly and used the time to surveil Ino and Sakura. Sakura had followed Ino and was now talking to her excitedly. I followed them at a discreet distance, too far to hear what they were saying. Soon enough, Ino took over the conversation and punctuated it by pointing at certain flowers. I ambled closer, hoping they were talking about the flowers. Maybe I could overhear enough to not horrifically fail this assignment.

"…And this one is Cosmos. It is the prettiest flower of autumn, like the Sakura flower is of Spring. Chabana only uses seasonal flowers, so this one is really important for it." Ino paused and turned from the flowers to face Sakura. "Why don't you know this stuff, anyway? Didn't your Mom ever show you?"

Sakura grimaced. "No, she never had time, she was always—" She cut off suddenly as something caught her eye. "Damn, I'd hoped they'd gone a different way…"

Apparently I wasn't the only one who'd noticed Sakura talking to Ino. Fuki approached, flanked by Kasumi and two girls I didn't recognize. Apparently she'd taken over the miniature gang of bullies in the absence of canon Ami.

"Ino-chan, don't tell me you're hanging around with Forehead-chan now." Fuki's sneer was a work of art. One part concern, two parts contempt and four parts 'I'm-better-than-you-in-every-way'. She turned to Sakura, "And you, billboard brow, what's with putting your bangs forward like that? Trying to cover up your forehead? Don't you understand you'll make less money with less advertising space?"

Kasumi & Co. snickered, pointing at Sakura, whose face was quickly coloring to match her hair. It seemed Fuki was a more original bully than canon Ami had been, but she was just as cruel.

My mind raced. I wasn't ready yet to make my move on Ino and Sakura, but I couldn't stand idly by and someone be hurt. With a lurch I realized that was exactly what I was doing to Naruto and Hinata by consigning them to a loneliness I could easily alleviate, until I felt like talking to them. I put that thought away for later investigation. I might not feel ready, but this was probably the best chance I would get to make a good first impression. Everybody likes a hero.

I quickly closed the ten feet between the flowers I'd been pretending to examine and the group of girls. Fuki had chosen to use a field she almost certainly knew nothing about for her put-down. I could exploit that. I opened my mouth to ask her if she thought institutional or product-focused advertising was more effective when I noticed Ino's movements. She had placed one foot behind the other and dropped her weight, in a rough approximation of the academy taijutsu stance. This was bad. Unsanctioned fights between prospective ninja were heavily punished. We were at an age where we had the ability to seriously hurt each other but lacked the control—emotional or physical—to make sure we didn't. I had to do something to head this off.

Ino's original solution to this problem would probably work. I considered the flowers in my hand. One of the thicker-stemmed ones was pretty similarly weighted to the chopsticks I had regularly practiced throwing (themselves practice for senbon). I took careful aim and threw right as Fuki opened her mouth again, presumably to taunt Sakura further.

It flew true and she received a mouthful of cellulose instead of the mouthful of vitriol she'd intended to give.

"Oy, Ino-san, that flower isn't poisonous is it?" I asked. I spoke casually, hoping she would take her cue from my demeanor and back down, instead of taking her cue from my actions and attacking.

She gave me a quick glance before turning to the sputtering bully. She put on a concerned face. "Oh yeah, very poisonous. It can be deadly if not treated right away. It might already be too late."

Tears formed in Fuki's eyes. She scrambled away from us, yelling for Suzume-sensei.

I called after her, "Sorry, Fuki-san! I never was very good at identifying flowers." I turned to her entourage, who still stood there bemusedly. They seemed unsure if they should follow Fuki or exact some sort of revenge. I made a shooing motion with my hands. "Run along now. I'm sure Fuki-san will need your support in this trying time." They shot us a confused, hateful glance and slunk away.

Well, that had ended up being a bit crueler than I had intended, but I still counted it as a success. Suzume came to see us a few seconds later. I explained how Fuki had tripped and fallen and ended up with a mouthful of flowers—terribly embarrassing for a ninja, I could see why she wouldn't want to admit it—and Ino and I had told her that the flower might be poisonous—I guess she'd panicked when she heard that, an unfortunate trait for a ninja to have—and she should probably ask Suzume-sensei as a precaution. Ino and Sakura backed up my story and Suzume was left with our word against theirs. After a brief deliberation she told Ami to watch where she was walking more carefully and suggested that the seven of us spend the rest of the class far away from each other.

Soon Ino, Sakura and I were left alone. I smiled at them tentatively. "Sorry if that was presumptuous of me. I couldn't stand there and listen to her blather on like that without doing something."

Ino gave me a wide grin. "Are you kidding? That was awesome."

I matched her with a grin of my own. "It wasn't that big a deal. I'm sure you would've done the same in my place."

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><p>.<p>

_Remember when I said things would happen this chapter? I lied. Bwa. Ha. Ha. Actually though, when I said that I was thinking chapter two would be what will now be chapters two and three._

_I'm not a huge fan of the amount of telling I had to do here, but to show all of these character traits would take tens of thousands of words, which I am not prepared to commit to for a glorified prologue. _

_Don't bother getting attached to these characters, they all die in the next chapter anyway._


	3. Chapter 3: Uchiha

**A/N:**

**On writing software: **My "30 day" free trial of Scrivener has been on its last day for over a year. Longest day of my life.

**On author's notes:** Let me know if you think my author's notes (pre- _or_ post-) are too extensive.

**Disclaimer: **I must not Kishimoto. Kishimoto is the mind-killer.

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><p>.<p>

**Chapter 3: How I Met Your Brother**

A fist whistled past my ear, missing by the barest of margins. I stepped in, trying to take advantage of the overextension, but my opponent was too fast. He stayed in step with me, keeping the distance between us far enough that I would need to lean in to get a hit off while he, with his longer reach, could reach me with ease.

His assault continued and I was soon the one stepping back, giving ground before his superior speed and strength. He hadn't managed to land a hit yet, but I was stuck entirely on the defensive, so it was only a matter of time. He feinted low and left, and I bit. His right hand came swinging in towards my ribs. I only noticed my mistake at the last second. I threw myself down and backwards as hard as I could, bending back at the waist. I overbalanced but caught myself on my hands, ending up in a yoga bridge pose.

My opponent moved forward, intent on exploiting my vulnerability. I channeled a bit of chakra into my feet, as much as I could manage in the split second I had, and kicked off, lifting one foot upwards while I threw the other backwards to counterbalance. The unorthodox move surprised him and my foot caught him on the side of his chin. It was a glancing blow, but it knocked him off balance and gave me a second to retreat. I turned the kick into a back handspring and ended up a few paces away.

Sasuke touched his chin and nodded, acknowledging the hit. He sank back into his stance and I prepared myself once more. We were practicing in one of the flat, arena-style training areas. The lack of terrain features severely restricted the tricks and misdirections I could use, which were usually the only things that let me make any progress against him. Still, I wouldn't go down without a fight. I brought my hands up and we resumed our dance.

I was on the defensive again almost immediately. I did not have the strength to block most of his attacks directly and evaded many of them by a finger's width. I was using a style I had found in the library a couple months ago. It focused on redirecting blows, flowing around your opponent's movements, drawing them into overextensions and exploiting mistakes. I was still a long, long, _long_ way from mastering it, but it was much more effective when physically outmatched than the academy style had been.

Sasuke came in high and hard and I grimaced, recognizing the start of one of his favorite combinations. A series of blindingly fast attacks, alternating high and low, were sure to follow. I could keep up for a bit but one would eventually slip through my guard and land me on my ass. I was still trying to figure out a counter to it. I knew almost exactly what he was going to do, but the speed at which he could execute the rehearsed strikes made it moot since I couldn't prevent it even with foreknowledge.

Perhaps words could do what actions could not. As he drew his hand back for the next strike I threw my hands up and yelled "No, don't! I'm pregnant!"

He didn't abort the attack, but he was thrown out of his rhythm and it came in much slower than normal. The bewildered look on his face made the bruises I was sure to have tomorrow totally worth it. I ducked under the blow and stepped in, twisting my knees, hips and shoulders to put as much power into my punch as I could. His eyes widened as my fist flew towards his abdomen. He began to step backwards, but there was no way he could move far enough in time. His hands flew together. My hand had just begun to sink into his stomach when he vanished in a puff of smoke. No way unless he shunshined, of course.

He was not yet good enough at shunshin to move more than a step or two, which meant he was still close by. I brought my hand up just in time to redirect a blow aimed at my temple. Its new course missed me by inches, but the follow-up caught my on the shoulder. I spun with the hit, but by the time I'd come back around Sasuke held a practice kunai well within striking range of my throat. We both knew I didn't have the space to dodge so I stepped back and made the seal of reconciliation, a smile spreading on my lips. The end result may have been the same, but at least it had happened differently this time. He scowled and returned the seal.

"That was a dirty trick," he said. "Doesn't even seem that applicable. It only worked here because you're someone I know."

"And you feared for the safety of my unborn child?" My smile widened. "Aw, Sasuke, you do care!"

He reddened. "I didn't want to potentially hurt my sparring partner," he said stiffly. "You being injured would hinder my own training."

"Of course that's it, you big softy. Besides, henging into the loved ones of your opponent is a pretty obvious tactic. You need to learn to disregard everything your opponent says and does that doesn't pertain directly to your mission. They are your enemy; every word out of an intelligent opponent's mouth will be an attack just as deadly as any kunai. There's a reason we use safe words in training. Unless you hear me say 'swordfish', everything else I say is just a distraction you should filter out. Now, when you…"

We discussed the match as he walked me back to my house. I couldn't match him directly in taijutsu, but I and, luckily, he, had realized I could still be a useful training partner. My shortcomings were purely physical ones, which meant I could still provide useful feedback and could notice openings he left or flaws in his style. I still managed to take the occasional bout off him with tricks and stratagems so he also considered it useful practice against a crafty opponent.

His reserved nature was proving to be quite the hindrance. I was slowly working on bringing down his walls. Not long ago the quip I'd made earlier about him caring would've had him leaving the conversation in a huff. That being said, he was still reticent and taciturn towards all non-Uchiha and I was running out of time. I did not know exactly when the Uchiha massacre took place (I don't think it's ever explicitly said in the manga), but I knew it was when Sasuke was seven. His birthday was been two weeks gone, and I still had yet to meet Itachi. I wanted to press for it, but I was afraid of pushing Sasuke away. I would have to do something soon, though, or the chance might pass me by.

We parted ways halfway my house, earlier than we usually did. He said 'Itachi-sama' had asked to see him before dinner this evening, so he had to go now. We agreed to meet tomorrow at training ground twelve, one of the forested training grounds. I had gone maybe a hundred feet when Sasuke came hurrying back. He stopped near me.

"What's up?" I asked.

"Ami, why did you want to be my training partner so badly? I noticed you made efforts to befriend several people from our class, but you tried by far the hardest with me. Why?"

Well, now. Truth be told, I had been expecting a question along these lines for a while. It was a good sign: it meant he was thinking about me as a person and not just a training tool. The second part of his question was even better. I didn't think he'd cared enough to pay attention to what anyone else in our class was doing.

Still, this would need to be handled with care. A misstep here could ruin all my hard work. Time for a mixture of truth, flattery and misdirection.

"Several reasons. Firstly, the obvious. I wanted a training partner so I could train myself. Of all the students in our class, it was pretty obvious you were the most skilled. Training with the most skilled person you can gives you the best opportunity and motivation for improvement. Ergo, I wanted you as my training partner.

"Beyond that, though…I think you've realized I would like to have you as a friend as much as a training partner. Companionship makes good things better and bad things more bearable. I'm not sure I could survive listening to Naruto and Kiba bickering for too much longer without someone to commiserate with. Everyone else of consequence in our class has some serious issues that would prevent me from truly having them as a friend"—a lie, but one I could easily backpedal on later—"or at least a close one. Kiba's aggressiveness. Shika's laziness. Ino and Sakura's superficiality. You have your own fair share of hangups, but you've got the positive qualities to offset them. Besides, I think a lot of them could be surmounted, in time.

"There's more. A less personal reason but arguably a more important one. The…"

I trailed off, trying to think of exactly how to phrase this next part. After perhaps ten seconds of silence, Sasuke prompted "The…?" I shook myself and resumed.

"War is coming. We may live in a rare time of peace, but this is still a ninja village. War is always coming. I fear that after this long without strife Konoha will have grown complacent, while the crueler villages are still being honed by their never-ending conflicts, both internal and external. War _is_ coming. It may take five years, it might take ten, it might even take fifteen, but it will get here eventually. I would have us ready to meet it. Our class is a unique opportunity. We have a concentration of clan heirs and geniuses you see at most once in a generation.

"Sure, most of them—us—don't look like much yet, but give it time. We could become one of the most formidable groups of ninja ever produced by a hidden village. I want to make sure we end up as a powerful group, not a powerful bunch of ninja stuck together. I intend to forge us into an aegis to protect Konoha in its time of need. Hence my befriending of everyone who seems like they might be important. I wasn't sure about Naruto or Sakura"—another lie, but one whose truth he would not believe—"but you need nine to make three teams, so we'll probably end up with one of them. You were both the most promising and most isolated, so I put in the extra effort." I smiled at him. "That reason enough?"

His eyes were a little wide. I considered my words. I had said more than I had intended and could understand if he were somewhat spooked. I had perhaps revealed my hand a little early. Oh well. No helping it now.

"That was…not what I expected," he said eventually. "It's a lot to think about." He was taking this better than I thought he would. "About the coming war…Itachi-kun has always said…"

He kept speaking but I was no longer listening. Alarms were blaring in my head. Itachi-_kun_? For all the times I had heard Sasuke talk about Itachi, I had never once heard him use any honorific other than 'sama' when refering to his brother. Sure, he probably called him Itachi-kun to…I stifled a laugh. Of course. A lot of small discrepancies fell into place. "Sasuke's" coming back to talk to me, despite the chance it would make him late for an appointment with his brother. His lack of confusion when I used words no seven-year-old, no matter how prodigious, would know. The lack of mark on his chin, which should be reddening if not bruising by now.

"…the elders. Anyway, we can discuss this later. I really do need to go now." He looked over at me, noticing my distraction. "You OK?"

"Yeah, fine. Just thinking. We still on for training ground seventeen tomorrow?"

"For sure. See you then." He turned to leave.

"Actually, before you go, could you do me a favor? I had an idea for a chakra training exercise I want you to try."

"I really should be going…" His reluctance was palpable, but I couldn't let him leave just yet.

"It'll only take a second. Just close your eyes and breathe deeply, in and out."

He gave me a reproachful look but complied. In a flash I was behind him, one kunai pressed to his carotid, another pressed to the back of his neck. He would not be jerking backwards out of this hold. I was pretty sure who he was, but there was no point in taking chances. Besides, there aren't a lot of better ways in the ninja world for making a good impression than getting the drop on someone, especially if they vastly outclassed you.

"Release the henge. And no funny business. I see your hands making any movement other than forming a ram seal and you'll get blood all over that nice Uchiha jacket."

He moved slowly, placing one hand on top of the other. There was a puff of smoke and suddenly my kunai were at his chest and back level. He held his hands out to the side in the universal sign of non-aggression. I eased myself backwards, returning my kunai to their holder. He turned and smiled crookedly at me.

"What gave it away?" Itachi asked. "I thought I knew my brother well enough to an almost-perfect henge of him."

"The henge was fine; it was the other small clues that damned you. He said he had to leave to meet you, something he would never be late for, but then he came back to ask me a question that could only have a long, complicated answer? Unlikely. Your easy acceptance of someone else making plans for him, ones that involved socializing no less, was uncharacteristic. I'm pretty sure Sasuke does not know what an aegis is. I landed a hit on him while sparring that should be showing by now. I might not have noticed, but you said Itachi-_kun, _which might be what he calls you around your family, but something he would never say to anyone else_."_

He groaned and slapped his forehead. "Of course. Itachi-san."

"Sama, actually. That boy thinks you…"—I almost said walk on water, which was somewhat less of a compliment to a ninja, but I caught myself at the last second—"…are the Sage of the Six Paths reincarnated. The nail in the coffin was your agreement to meet at training ground seventeen tomorrow, instead of twelve like we'd discussed."

As I talked, I thought furiously. This was exactly the chance I'd been waiting for, but it would require some fast footwork and careful steps.

"Well, you are not at all what I expected," he said, chuckling and rubbing his neck where my kunai had drawn a speck of blood, "but I guess I deserved that. I came to take your measure, and I suppose I've found it."

My mind flashed back to his original question. He'd known about my befriending of the others, which meant…

"Why wait? You must've observed me long ago. Why wait until now to actually approach me?"

"Sasuke told me about this little girl with purple hair who was really eager to train with him"—really eager? I thought I'd played it cooler than that—"so I checked you out. I saw you approaching all the heirs and pegged you as a clanless kunoichi trying to curry favor with the future clan heads. It's pretty common, though few start that young." His eyes flashed. "Should've guessed you were trying to 'forge an aegis to protect Konoha in its time of need'. Obvious in hindsight, really."

He smiled at me and I took that as my cue.

"In the interest of full disclosure, what I said before wasn't the whole story. I would never say this to Sasuke-kun, as he's a little skittish, but it will hopefully put your mind at ease. I was never really able to connect with the children I grew up with. They all seemed so immature and, frankly, simple. Books always seemed so much more interesting than they did, something I'm sure you can sympathize with. Still, I harbored a secret desire for a friend. A best friend. The kind of friend you never have to justify yourself to, since they know you better than you do. The kind of friend who always has your back, no matter what. The kind of friend who would stand with you against the world and dare the world to do its worst.

"Like you have with Shisui-san." For a brief instant his face looked as if I'd slapped him, before he replaced it with the bored, lightly amused mask he usually wore. I would've missed it had I not been watching him so carefully. I spoke on blithely, pretending not to have noticed. "Sasuke talks about you all the time." Technically true, though he had never actually mentioned Shisui to me. "I know most people don't try choose their best friends; they just wait and hope it works out for the best. I have always been more deliberate than most people." I smiled back at him. "So you've nothing to worry about. I want what's best for Sasuke almost as much as you do."

His eyes refocused and he spoke again, much gruffer than he had been. "Good. You had better. I find out you're lying or you've done something to hurt him…" His eyes darkened. "…and I'll get blood all over this nice Uchiha jacket."

He turned to leave, but I had one last thing to say. "Same goes to you. I know you love him and would never do anything you didn't have to that would hurt him, but I'm not sure you realize just how much he cares for you. If _you_ ever do anything to hurt him, ever do anything to turn that love into hatred, it would destroy him."

I hadn't been as subtle as I'd hoped to be, but I thought my "coincidentally topical" words for Itachi had gone over fairly well for something composed on the fly. He certainly realized something; I just hoped it was what I'd been pushing him towards.

He stared at me for a second before he nodded and, with a flicker, was gone.

.

* * *

><p>.<p>

I was walking home from Shikamaru's a few weeks later. We had had a particularly intense game of Shogi and my mind was filled with drops, promotions, gold generals and checks. I was remembering one of the pivotal positions and considering what other moves I could have made when I was grabbed by the throat and slammed into a nearby wall.

"Who are you?" The question was punctuated by another slam against the wall. "How did you know this would happen?" _Thud_. "Why didn't you warn me directly?" _Thud_.

I lifted my head and Itachi's eyes met mine. They were full of madness. Madness, and the Mangekyō Sharingan.

_._

* * *

><p><em>.<em>

_When I said 'these characters' in the last post-chapter authors notes, I meant the Uchiha mentioned while describing Sasuke. I thought that was pretty clear. _

_In case you're curious, Itachi didn't spend a couple days following Ami around; he's kind of a busy guy. He used a shadow clone._

_I wanted to show Ami meeting all the rookie nine, but this pre-arc is already running really long, and I don't think I could do the meetings justice with less than 500 words apiece. Maybe I'll save those for a side-story to be written if I ever need a break from the main one._

_Was the foreshadowing with the sparring match too obvious? Too subtle? Just to be sure we're on the same page: the bit at the end of it was supposed to parallel Ami's attempts to divert the massacre. "…I couldn't prevent it even with the foreknowledge. Perhaps words could do what actions could not…The end result may have been the same, but at least it had happened differently this time."_

_This chapter does not mean that Sasuke X Ami will be this fic's pairing. The previous sentence does not mean that Sasuke X Ami will not be this fic's pairing. _

_** yvonna:** This Ami doesn't really think about her appearance, something which may or may not bite her in the ass later, so it's not something I think she would actually mention in her internal monologue. You'll get a description if it ever becomes plot-relevant, i.e. something she has to think about. _


	4. Chapter 4: Mind Games

**A/N:**

**On cliffhangers: **Sorry for ending the last chapter like that. I was going to have a week and a bit where I knew I wouldn't be able to get any writing done and I wanted to get the chapter up. Will I use cliffhangers again? Tune in to the next author's notes to find out!

**On jutsu: **Any jutsu you don't know can be looked up at the Naruto wiki. It's pretty accurate and comprehensive. Any jutsu that differs from canon or is invented will be documented in the story (you will know at least as much about it as Ami does).

**Disclaimer:** What is Kishimoto can never die.

* * *

><p><strong>Chapter 4: Mind Games<strong>

There was no way I could overcome or even match Itachi along any axis. I was completely at his mercy, but that did not mean I was powerless. So long as I retained the ability to speak I could work this to my advantage, or at least minimize my losses.

I rolled my eyes back in my head and went limp. It would only buy me a few seconds, but I desperately needed time to think.

I needed to figure out what exactly had happened. His questions implied that he had taken my words for the hints they were, rather than wisdom out of the mouth of babes like I'd intended. Likely that's what he'd thought originally, but upon seeing how applicable they were, he now assumed foreknowledge. That was a somewhat tenuous leap of logic that I could perhaps exploit.

His Mangekyō Sharingan made it likely Shisui was dead. I suppose it's possible the death of his parents could have awakened it. Or, I thought with a chill, the death of his brother. He thought I knew what would happen, based on what I'd told him. The two things I'd said were, in essence, to trust Shisui and not to make his brother hate him. Him thinking my words were prophetic probably meant he'd done the former and they'd reconciled, and that he'd been forced to the latter. That, combined with his anger, made it likely that the massacre had happened, though not necessarily in the same way as in canon. But, if he'd gone to Shisui, then how…? Pain intruded into my thoughts. My back throbbed, my neck hurt and I was starting to get a splitting headache.

"Stop feigning unconsciousness." Itachi shook me violently. "I can see you're still awake. Who are you with? Madara? No, that doesn't make sense…Danzo? No…"

I mumbled incoherently as I considered my options.

Telling the truth. Result if successful: possible acquisition of Itachi as an asset. Likely reprisal for not doing more. Possible violence. Chance of success: very low. Hard to believe. In current aggravated state unlikely to wait patiently for proof. Not viable.

Claiming prophetic jutsu. Result if successful: Very probable violent requital. Chance of success: very low. Only known instance toad sage, unreliable. Not viable.

Any answer with foreknowledge likely to result in reprisal.

Pretending patsy/mouthpiece for greater player. Result if successful: anger, but not at me. Itachi takes other as enemy. Chance of success: low. Not enough information to accurately portray. Complexity penalty. Possible but unideal.

Pretending ignorance. Result if successful: undirected anger. Likely leave me out of it. Chance of success: moderate. Original conclusion tenuous. Simplest explanation. Possible interrogation. Best solution under circumstances.

"What…do you…mean? Why…are you doing…this…to me?" My words came out through gritted teeth, my pain and confusion only half-feigned.

"No!" he yelled, "Don't you _dare_ try to play dumb with me! You remind me I can trust Shisui right as we're placed at odds. And then Sasuke…" He trailed off, eyes staring at a point miles behind me.

I almost spoke to try to prompt him to continue, but I held my tongue. For every second he spent reliving past events, the village's defenders would be one second closer to finding us and chasing him off. There were things I wanted to achieve with him that could only be done through talking: I wanted to find out exactly what had happened, I wanted to convince him I was not to blame, I wanted to reaffirm his loyalty to Konoha. Above all else, though, I wanted to live through the next two minutes. I gave myself perhaps even odds. Odds that improved every second he spent not killing me.

His eyes refocused on me with a murderous glint and I decided to change my approach. Maybe getting him talking would calm him down. His thoughts and memories were probably not a very soothing place to dwell at the moment.

"What…happened? Is Sasuke…OK? If you…talk to me, I'll…tell you everything I know about…whatever you're talking about."

"You want to know what happened? I'll show you."

His eyes met mine and the Mangekyō grew until it filled the entirety of my vision.

_Oh, shit_. The Tsukiyomi. I'd been hoping he hadn't figured it out yet. With it he would be able to make seconds seem like days. There went any hope of stalling for time. I would have to actually convince him I knew nothing. Unfortunately, I had no clever ideas for how to do that. All I could do was act like someone who knew nothing and hope he would eventually believe me. That would come later. For now I needed to watch and observe.

I was standing in an open field. Across from me stood Danzō, Shisui on my right. Black bangs obscured my vision on my left side. I was seeing Itachi's memory from his perspective.

I listened as Danzō tried to convince Shisui and Itachi that a peaceful solution to the Uchiha uprising was not possible. Watched as he tried to attack Shisui, to be almost contemptuously subdued with a genjutsu. Saw Danzō use Izanagi and snatch Shisui's right eye in his moment of surprise. Shisui made as if to run away while Danzō placed the stolen eye in his eye socket but paused first, looking back at me—at Itachi—who still stood there, frozen with indecision, torn between his loyalty to his friend and his loyalty to his village. In that moment of hesitation, Danzō was there.

There was no overt sign, no flash of lights or blaring noise, but Shisui stiffened. He stood there, motionless, hands almost touching. Itachi jumped forward and struck at Danzō, but the blow passed straight through him. A look of horror came over Shisui's features and he completed the seal, disappearing without a trace.

"What have you done?" Itachi's voice came from my lips.

"What I had to." Danzō turned to face Itachi. His right eye was closed but was still bleeding copiously. "You should probably get going. I'm not positive Shisui can take on the whole Uchiha clan by himself."

Itachi was gone before Danzō even finished speaking. I won't describe what came next. Though the Uchiha clan were renowned fighters, they were as children before the combined might of their two greatest living geniuses. I noticed Shisui was being profligate with his chakra usage. Several times he used kotoamatsukami on opponents he could probably have taken by hand.

Soon enough the two of them were standing in the Uchiha courtyard. They were the last moving things in the compound. Blood splattered them nearly from head to toe, a souvenir of their night of butchery.

"Please tell me the kotoamatsukami on you has finished." Itachi's voice wavered. "Don't make me do this."

"I was almost hoping one of the family would be able to stop me, to spare you this." Shisui smiled a sad smile. "But I'm glad it will be you. You're someone I could be proud to die to. I've used kotoamatsukami too many times tonight for me to use it again. Take care of my remaining eye, won't you? Destroy it or use it as you see fit, just keep it out the wrong hands."

"It doesn't have to be like this. Surely we can…"

"My orders were to wipe out the Uchiha clan. There—"

The doors to the compound opened and an all-too-familiar face came into sight. Shisui moved but Itachi moved faster. A kunai appeared in his hand and embedded itself in Shisui's stomach. Shisui leaned forward, lips nearly touching Itachi's ear. "Thank you…brother." He keeled over sideways and lay unmoving, blood pooling around him.

Red overcame Itachi's vision as he turned to face Sasuke. The world faded around me and I found myself on a featureless plain, stretching as far as the eye could see. Itachi stood in front of me, staring off at the horizon.

"So died Shunshin no Shisui, ninja of Konoha." He turned to face me. "So now you've seen 'what happened'. Talk."

I could only see one avenue out of this. "Is Sasuke…OK?" I made my voice as small as it could go, the desperate mewling of a little girl in way over her head, worried for her one and only real friend.

"As if you care. We'll see if you're more talkative a few seconds from now."

The background seamlessly transitioned into a dark room. I found myself chained to a table at the wrists and ankles.

I will spare you the details of what followed. My memory of it is none-too-clear anyway. All I remember is a haze of hooks and screws. The smell of searing meat. And, above all else, pain.

I don't want to downplay the horror of what I went through, but in a certain sense, Itachi was surprisingly gentle. I think it was a testament to his pacifist nature that even driven to the edge of reason—or perhaps slightly beyond it—physical pain was all he tried to inflict on me. With the nigh-infinite power of the Tsukiyomi he could have shown me horrors that would scar the mind beyond recovery. My own nightmares about the massacre were more creatively painful, full of Uchiha with empty, bleeding eye sockets, chanting "We died and you did nothing." He, on the other hand, limited himself to pains he could have inflicted in the real world.

I had read that torture was easier to withstand if you picked a mantra and repeated it to yourself over and over. It helped you focus on why you would not break. A prisoner of war might think _I will not betray my country_, a betrayed man might think _I will have my revenge_. Given the illusory nature of my tribulation, the phrase I found myself repeating was _There is no spoon_. It sounds somewhat silly in hindsight, but it did help.

I tried to convince myself that what I was feeling wasn't real, but that proved impossible to do completely. That might have worked against the aforementioned mental horrors, but the truth is that the pain was real, even if its sources weren't.

I spent the first…hour? It was really hard to tell how much time was passing…protesting my innocence. After…some time…had passed, I began yelling every possible explanation I could think of. I told Itachi I was the last of a long line of seers. I told him I was a time traveler. I told him Danzō warned me. I told him I heard it whispered on the wind. I told him I'd received a letter telling me the words to say. Eventually I fell silent. There was no way he would believe anything I'd said, but had I been what I was trying to seem (a little girl caught up in things way over her head) I would probably have tried to tell him whatever I thought he wanted to hear.

The pain made it hard to think, but there were peaks and valleys, and I used the low points to consider my situation. I had to convince him that I knew nothing. Silence would possibly work for that, but that could take a long time and I wasn't sure how much more I could bear. Besides, there was a possibility silence would just seem like I was trying really hard to hide something. Instead, I would try a 'confession' that was something innocent-Ami would come up with, hoping to convince Itachi that it was the truth so he would let her go.

There is a conception in game theory of different levels of deception. If I tell a lie that someone is supposed to take at face value, I am acting as a level one player. If someone sees through my deception, they are a level two player. If my original intention was to have them see through the deception (to have them model me as a level one player) then I am acting as a level three player. If they see through that, they are level four, and so on, ad infinitum.

The quality of the lie has nothing to do with the level of deception. The most solid cover story ever conceived, complete with dozens of references, false documentation and backed up by world-class acting is still a first-level deception. In fact, there tends to be an inverse correlation between quality of lie and level of deception. If you're telling a lie you want to be believed, you make it as complete as possible. Likewise, if you're telling a lie to look like kind of the person who would tell that lie, it's a big problem if you're too convincing and end up being believed. It can't be too flimsy, though. If they don't have to work for it, it won't seem like it was supposed to be believed in the first place.

I had to hope Itachi was modeling me as a first-level player. If he was already modeling me as a third-level player, not only would this deception fail, he would likely be too suspicious of me for anything else to work. I also hoped that the (subjective) days had given him time to calm down somewhat. By now his naturally peaceable nature would hopefully be exerting itself and he would be having qualms about torturing a—to all appearances—innocent, seven-year-old girl.

After some time (days? Weeks? Surely not months) I called out for Itachi. He appeared before I'd finished saying his name. He looked the same as he had outside the genjutsu, down to the pattern of the bloodstains on his jacket. The only difference was his haggard expression. The anger that had marred his features was still there, but now it was shot through with exhaustion.

"Have you decided to talk?" It might have been wishful thinking on my part, but it his voice sounded almost…regretful.

"Yes…Ican't…takeitanymore." I spoke between gasps, the words slurring together.

His visage softened. Suddenly we were sitting in a small room. A short table with a tea set on it sat between us. The room was similar to the Nara receiving room, except for the large fan on the wall, so I took it to be a recreation of one of the rooms of the Uchiha compound.

The lack of pain was almost euphoric. I looked at my arms expecting to see scars, but the skin was unblemished. _There was no spoon_. Itachi sat, waiting patiently for me to get my bearings. I began hesitantly.

"He came to me one night. He called himself Madara. I don't know what he looked like; all I can remember is his eyes."—I took care to pronounce the plural—"He told me…well, you know what he told me to say. He said if I ever told anyone I'd met him that he'd kill…my parents." I tried for tears and failed, settling for a quivering lip. "Now will you let me go? I don't know how you've hidden from Konoha this long, but they'll find us eventually…won't they?" I stuck my chin out and tried to look like I was trying to look confident. "And, and, Sasuke will never forgive you if you don't let me go. That is, I mean, assuming Sasuke is still…" My uncooperative tear ducts finally gave in and moisture ran down my cheeks. I buried my head in my hands, the spitting image of a defeated little girl. It was barely an act. The desperation in my voice was completely unfeigned. I wasn't sure what I would do if he sent me back to that dark room.

After several seconds of crying I looked up to see Itachi staring at me, horror naked on his face. "You really don't know anything, do you? Oh Kami, what have I done?" He reached out towards me and I flinched backwards, falling out of my chair. He shook his head sadly. The sitting room disappeared and I found myself floating.

Genjutsu affects the senses. It cannot force you to feel things except by providing the stimulus that makes you feel those things. That being said, true masters of genjutsu can provide subtleties to your experiences that seem to almost transcend physicality. Itachi was such a master.

I was floating in emptiness, bathed in a gentle white light that somehow managed to combine all the best qualities of a mother's caress, a friend's hug and a lover's casual contact. I couldn't make out any distinct sounds, but nonetheless my ears were full of a soothing lullaby. There was no pain, no discomfort. You never realize it, always having a body like you do, but there are always small discomforts. Itches which need scratching, scratches that hurt. You're always a little hungry or thirsty or stiff or have to go to the washroom. There is never true comfort, except in the tsukiyomi.

Now that I had executed my plan, such as it had been, the inertia that had been carrying me forward dissipated. The mental barriers I had constructed to keep myself from thinking about what I'd been through came tumbling down. My scrams rang out into the void, letting out my pain, horror and anger. Tears rolled down my face, dripping off my chin. The tsukiyomi—Itachi—would not let me wallow in despair, however. As the screams left my throat they somehow turned into defiant, triumphant cries, proclaiming my victory over the trials I'd been through, loudly affirming that I would emerge strengthened from the ashes of my pain. The tears on my face did not feel like salty water; they felt like the hands of friends helping me up after a devastating fall.

I floated and I healed. The tsukiyomi (it was easier to think of the tsukiyomi as a separate entity from Itachi, mending where he had only destroyed) helped, making me more comfortable than was physically possible, but the scars of the mind are not so easily restored. My thoughts drifted as my body did. For the first time in years I wasn't making plans. I wasn't preparing for the future or trying to eke out marginal advantages. I was just existing. For the first time in years, images of my old life drifted through my mind.

It struck me then that I wouldn't be going home. I had known that before of course, but I hadn't really believed it. I had been so focused on the future that I had been able to keep myself from thinking about the past. I had almost been treating this like a game, or a particularly convoluted optimization problem. Sure, I had goals that were rooted in caring about the well-being of people in this universe, but I hadn't really become fully emotionally invested. I loved my parents, but it was almost in the way that you love a movie character. You cheer when they succeed, cry when they fail, and really hope everything ends well for them. Two hours later you walk out of the theater and put them out of your mind, only to be revisited in the case of a sequel.

There was still a part of me that expected the credits to start rolling any minute. Still thought I would walk out of the theater and settle back into my old life. I had avoided thinking of all that I had lost, refusing to believe that I would never see my friends and family again. That I would never again go drunkenly bowling with Luke. Never explore another abandoned building with Jessica. Never settle once and for all with Richard whether cavemen or astronauts would win in a fight. Never see my brother and the girl three doors down finally get over themselves and admit their feelings for each other. Never do…so many things.

I drifted as seven years of repressed tears ran down my face. At some point Itachi's voice spoke in my ear, telling me he wasn't sure how much longer he could maintain the genjutsu, but he'd give me as long to recover as he could. He said that Sasuke was fine but thought that Itachi had killed his clan to test himself. He said I could never tell Sasuke the truth, that it would turn Sasuke against the village. He said I should let the hate drive Sasuke, but keep it from consuming him.

He said more things but I stopped listening. I didn't answer him. I knew I should. He was, or would be, one of the most powerful and important people in this world I was now stuck in. This would probably be my last chance for years to influence him or warn him or pump him for information, but I just couldn't bring myself to say anything to him, or even to listen to the rest of what he had to say. My emotions were too raw, the pain far too fresh.

I'm not sure how long my convalescence lasted; I had no way to tell time. Eventually the calm of my surroundings began to permeate my ravaged psyche. I had almost begun to feel like a functional human being again when I was dropped back into my real body.

I found myself sprawled across the hard ground. The aches and pains of corporeality were grating after the soothing numbness of the tsukiyomi. My body felt relatively intact, aside from the bruising from Itachi's original rough questioning. My pants were wet; my bladder must have released while my mind was elsewhere.

Itachi stood on the other side of the street. His left eye was tightly shut and bled freely. It looked as if he were wearing a red mask on half his face. A slouched figure stood between us. An ANBU dog mask sat slanted on his face, framed by a mane of silver-gray hair. He and Itachi were speaking, but my tired mind couldn't make sense of the words. Eventually Itachi left. Dogface took a step after him but glanced back at me and let him go.

Dogface walked over to me and bent down. He asked me something. I shook my head. As he gently picked me up, my sluggish mind made the connection between the mask and the hair. _Kakashi. _

He pressed one finger against my temple and said the first word I'd understood since reentering the real world.

"_Sleep"_

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><p>I awoke in the hospital. I was examined by several medic-nin, all of whom declared me physically fine. A Yamanaka mind-healer was brought in, but I refused to let him into my head. There were ways to get into the mind of an unwilling victim, but the trauma that entailed made it likely that would do more harm than good.<p>

I was aware of what went on around me, but I couldn't make myself react. Everything reminded me of my time under the knife, threw me back into that state of helplessness and pain. Every face I saw was Itachi's, mouth set in a grim line. Every bit of speech I heard was him asking me what I knew. Everything that touched me was an instrument of torture. Every smell was the smell of burnt flesh. Every taste was the taste of my own blood. Removed from the soothing senselessness of the tsukiyomi, I could not handle the world around me.

My mind nearly broke again, to return to the catatonic bliss in which I'd spent the first year of this life, but I held on. When I had dwelt on the things I'd lost with my resurrection I had inevitably also thought of what I'd gained in return. My parents. Sasuke. Shikamaru. Ino. The other children. Chakra. Purpose. I had too much anchoring me to this world to run lightly from it now. The time I'd spent recovering in the tsukiyomi had helped, giving me some distance from the torture. I'm not sure I would've ever recovered if I'd been thrust back into the harshness of reality right away.

Over the course of the next few days I slowly regained my ability to interact with the world. My speech was halting and my actions unsure, but the nurses assured me that that would come back in time. My parents were ecstatic.

I had an interview with the Hokage. I played the innocent, victimized child and spent half the time talking about Sasuke. He seemed to accept my story and draw my intended conclusion: that I'd been targeted for being Sasuke's friend.

A week after my admittance, I was allowed to have non-familial visitors. They came in ones and twos. Chouji and Shikamaru came together. The former brought several packaged meals, to deliver me from the evils of hospital food. The latter came with a Shogi board. He let me win. Hinata sent me an incredibly formal letter of well-wishing, the effect of which was spoiled by her hastily scrawled note at the bottom, telling me to hurry up and recover, as 'Naruto-kun' seemed lonely without me. The aforementioned fox-boy tried to bring me a bowl of ramen, but he ended up eating most of it on the way. I assured him that it was OK, and that I would get more enjoyment from seeing him enjoy it than I would from eating it myself. Sakura and Ino visited together. Sakura tried to ask about the incident, but Ino seemed to know better and steered the conversation towards lighter topics.

Two weeks after I'd been admitted, the day before I was due to be discharged, Sasuke came to see me. He entered my room quietly and stood silently at the foot of my bed. He looked like he belonged in the hospital more than I did. His skin was even paler than usual. His eyes were sunken and sat atop large, dark bags. I tried to say something, but the words died in my throat. He looked so much like Itachi I had to look away.

"I'm going to kill him." Sasuke's voice was cold and hard. There was no need to say who 'him' referred to. The words seemed to hang between us for a second before Sasuke began to walk towards the door. I couldn't let him leave like this. If he left now he would be heading down the road of the lone avenger, a road that would inevitably lead to open conflict with Konoha. I forced words out.

"No." He turned back at the sound of my voice. "When we're ready, we'll kill him together." I had intended the words as a lie that would keep Sasuke from heading down his road alone, but they rang with truth as I spoke them. I wasn't sure I would be able to _stop_ myself from trying to kill Itachi when next I saw him, consequences be damned.

Sasuke regarded me silently for a moment before he nodded sharply and left, closing the door behind him.

* * *

><p><em>I got tired of SI, so I thought I'd try tackling some other fanfiction sub-genres. HurtComfort? Took about 20 (in-universe(non-subjective)) seconds. Easy.  
><em>

_The character's belief's do not necessarily reflect my own. Ami choosing to forgive Itachi does not mean I condone the torture of small children. Ami choosing to not forgive Itachi does not mean I disregard the mitigating effects of stresses and circumstance upon actions. You should only think I actually think something if I personally tell you I believe it, and confirm—twice—that I am not joking. _

_Also, though this should go without saying, I feel I should remind you all that Ami is not an omniscient narrator. Things she says that aren't direct observations or statements about herself, especially when she guesses at the motivations or explanations for others' actions, should not necessarily be believed whole-heartedly._


	5. Chapter 5: Seals

**On reviews: **I still want 'em, you still got 'em. Every time I get a review an angel gets its wings.

**Disclaimer: **Hell hath no fury like Kishimoto scorned.

* * *

><p><strong>Chapter 5: Seal Hunting Season<strong>

The rest of my years at the academy passed relatively uneventfully.

My time was split between classes, training, and social networking. I had begun the academy leagues ahead of almost everyone in my class in pretty much every ninja skill, but they caught up quickly. My years of self-training had given me a head start, but their natural aptitude meant that they improved much faster than I did. I stayed ahead of the non-clan shinobi for the most part, but by the time I was eight it had become clear to me I would soon fall far behind everyone else (everyone who mattered). Where I had once stood at the head, I was on the brink of being merely the first wave of a sea of mediocrity.

That simply would not do.

Until that point I had been focusing mostly on improving my general skills, the ones that were taught at the academy. This was necessary, both because the basics were important to success, and because I would need to be the top-rated kunoichi in my class to be placed with Sasuke and Naruto. The top kunoichi and shinobi from each class were almost always placed on a team with the worst.

I had been planning on remaining a generalist until I graduated, for two reasons. Firstly, my intelligence would likely be one of my best assets in a fight. For intelligence to be useful, you need a number of tactical options, the more varied the better. Secondly, once I became a genin I would have much better access to training materials. I would be allowed to use the genin section of the ninja library, and I would be able to solicit my jōnin for lessons.

That plan had to change. As it stood, it was looking like I would be noticeably weaker than canon Sakura upon graduation. A few months would not be enough to get me up to snuff for Wave, if Wave ended up happening, or for the Suna-Oto invasion, which would almost certainly still happen in some form or other.

I spent a few months investigating my options. Pretty much all ninjutsu was out because of my tiny chakra reserves. An exceptionally powerful affinity was my only hope there, quickly dashed after a brief date with some chakra paper that refused to react, no matter how much chakra I pumped into it. Likewise, taijutsu and kenjutsu were not really options because of my poor strength and mediocre speed.

Genjutsu was a possibility. I had the imagination and—just barely—the chakra control for it. Unfortunately, there was a large portion of the ninja population against whom genjutsu was completely useless. Anyone with a dōjutsu, along with people who had trained themselves to be immune, like Deidara. Besides, a large portion of my fights would—hopefully—be spent alongside Kakashi and/or Sasuke, both of whom could use genjutsu much more effectively than I could because of their Sharingan. I would learn the basics, but specializing in it did not seem like a clever idea.

I tried to learn some basic medical jutsu, but my chakra control proved insufficient. My control was pretty good for direct manipulations, the result of endless hours of leaf sticking and similar exercises, but I could not get the hang of isolating Yin chakra. I would probably be able to add some simple healing jutsu to my repertoire, but there was no way I could be anything but a second-rate medic-nin. Only the very best medic-nin could fight on the front-lines, something I would really like to be able to do.

I had nearly resigned myself to being a non-combatant when I discovered fūinjutsu.

I had known about sealing before, of course. Seals played an important part in the manga, and I saw them around Konoha every so often. Still, how sealing worked was never really explained by Kishimoto. I had looked into it here and was disheartened by what I found. Seals were, according to the books I read, most akin to pieces of art. Much like jutsu, no one was quite sure exactly how seals worked.

Actually, for this explanation to make any sense, I should probably first explain where jutsu come from.

Researching the invention of jutsu was one of the first things I did when given access to the library. Most of the books on the theory of jutsu were available to everyone; it was only the practical books that were restricted. I suppose they thought just knowing the theory would not be dangerous for academy students. Or maybe they thought no academy student would bother to read the immense, abstruse tomes. Either way, I thought the invention process very important to know. Had it been exploitable, it would have been a very easy route to power. My plans for making an E-ranked insta-kill jutsu did not last long, however.

Most elemental jutsu are very straight-forward. Want a fireball? Create some fire-natured chakra and throw it at whatever needs burning. Want a wall of earth? Spread some earth-natured chakra and solidify it. Want a hat made of air? No, you don't. Why would anyone ever want that?

On the other hand, many jutsu have effects that are incredibly abstracted from how the chakra to perform them is actually manipulated. What is it about a certain configuration of chakra that makes you switch places with another object? Or imbues a shadow clone with consciousness?

There had to be underlying rules. I had been placed in a world where, terminology excepted, magic was real. That didn't drastically change who I was. I was a scientist, a rationalist, a child of the information age. Causality was the cornerstone of my worldview, predictable outcomes the windows. I always cringed when I used to read fantasy novels full of scientists that declared magic impossible or unscientific. Science is not a body of knowledge, but an approach. If you find something that breaks your known laws, it doesn't mean that thing is unscientific, or that science is wrong. It means that _that law_ is wrong. Or, more commonly, that that law is imprecise and does not apply at this scale/to this case. You can't point at a portion of reality and call it unscientific unless you were saying that it operated arbitrarily, without conformity to a set of laws. I would not do that. Everything I'd ever encountered was governed by laws. Regardless, if those laws existed, they were not known to the ninja world at large.

This raised the question of how new jutsu were created/discovered. The answer was not particularly satisfying. After using a jutsu for a long time and achieving a high degree of proficiency with it, ninja tended to develop an intuition about its workings. That intuition, along with a healthy dose of trial and error, let ninja develop enhancements or modifications of the jutsu. That was why most jutsu tended to be part of a family of techniques, all centered around a basic one. Most ninja never reach the point where they can develop jutsu, and use only those that they are taught.

No one knows where the first jutsu came from. The written history of the ninja world is very sparse, despite it being at most a thousand years old. All of the recently invented jutsu, like the Rasengan and Chidori, were relatively straightforward elemental manipulations. Straightforward in concept, at least, if not in execution.

To learn a new jutsu was a simple matter of learning the hand-signs and chakra manipulations. It takes practice to be able to do quickly precisely, and to learn the intricacies, but that was essentially it.

Which brings us back to sealing. The invention of new seals was fairly similar to the invention of new jutsu, except that the intuition it entailed was rarer but more broadly applicable. Someone who had studied barrier seals might be able to develop a new type of barrier that was only tangentially related to the seals they had already learned.

I should perhaps be more careful with my speech. Using words like studied and learned makes it seem much more academic and deliberate than it is. Intuition is probably the best word to keep in mind. I have never experienced it myself, but I have heard it likened to the composition of music. There are some basic rules you can learn and follow deliberately, but for the most part you just have to go with what feels right. Some people can do it and others—no matter how talented they may be as performers—cannot.

Seals are also notoriously hard to learn for those did not invented them. They need to be modified based on the specific circumstances of their use, something that requires great familiarity. On top of that, one has to hold the form and function of the seal in one's mind when activating it. There were seals that avoided that limitation, such as Orochimaru's cursed seals and the explosive tags used by ninja everywhere, but those had trade-offs in other areas. The former was hooked directly into the subject's chakra system, placed great strain upon the body, and drew massive amounts of chakra to use. The latter was severely constrained in its power and versatility. Usually the only ones who could use a given seal were the creator's direct apprentices, and even then it usually required years of working together, until they understood not only the seal but also the mind of its progenitor.

All this made it rather unlikely that I would be learning fūinjutsu, especially with the lack of seal masters in Konoha. Jiraiya was the only one affiliated with the village of leaves, but he was nowhere to be found and probably wouldn't be for years.

A few weeks after writing off fūinjutsu, I was reading a book on inventions. I was trying to get a handle on the tech level of this world, which did not seem to progress logically. This particular book dealt with seals that had been used to perform functions now fulfilled by technology. The book itself was not particularly interesting. It had been written by a civilian inventor and was full of derision for these primitives who "didn't even know gears worked!" I half-expected the author to proclaim that their sad devotion to that ancient ninja religion had not helped them conjure up the stolen data tapes.

Despite the book's shortcomings, its appendices were detailed and well-documented. Hundreds of pages of diagrams, showing the devices and the seals that made them function. The seals had a certain beauty to them, but for the most part it was the beauty of abstract art. Aside from the kanji that sat at their hearts, the lines that comprised the seals seemed completely arbitrary to me. At first.

As I flipped through the book, a small clumping of lines started to jump out at me. It was in a different place in each seal, and I would almost certainly not have noticed were if not for its resemblance to the crest of my high school sports team. It differed a fair bit from seal to seal, but all were variations on the same theme. They differed, but were definitely related, and they showed up in every seal.

I sometimes wonder what would have happened were it not for that coincidental resemblance that tipped me off. Without it, I would probably have never learned sealing, and all this might have been avoided. At the time, I was overjoyed.

That recurring element raised the possibility that seals were constructed with a sort of pictographic language. That had been one of my original hypotheses for their working, but I had dismissed it after reading about the intuition and artistry that were the backbone of their creation. Now, though…What if it were a pictographic language, just one that seal masters spoke instinctively rather than consciously? Many children (and some adults) could carry on perfectly reasoned, understandable conversations, even if they had no idea what nouns or clauses or tenses were.

That was a somewhat tenuous jump from noticing the similarities of a few squiggly lines, but if felt right. It made everything fit. Still, it would need further investigation. I spent the next several months cross-referencing the similarities for every seal I could find, noting which properties correlated with each set of lines. It was laborious work, but of a kind that I loved. This problem solving, the thrill of a picture slowly coming into focus, the eureka moments that accompanied each discovery of a piece of the puzzle, was something that I had sorely missed since my PHD days.

It quickly became clear (quickly on the scale of research, so a couple months in) that sealing _was_ a pictographic language. To be specific, it was a polysynthetic, agglutinative, incorporative language. For all you non-linguists, that means that, respectively, each word (seal, in this case) was composed of many morphemes (pieces of language that have independent meaning), each affix (bit added onto the front or end of a word) had one meaning, and that certain word categories could be stuck together, like verbs and their objects. It's not terribly important that you understand the technical details. Suffice to say that it was a language I was slowly beginning to understand.

The kanji at the center of each seal described its primary function. The other lines provided specifics, and, for more complicated seals, linked secondary kanji to the main one. Looking at an explosive tag, one of the simplest seals, the kanji for explode was in the center. Around it were symbols that affected the size of the explosion, the heat, whether the explosion was directed away from the seal or towards the object it sat on, the trigger mechanism, etc…

Drastic changes to the explosion could be accomplished by linking it to other kanji. Linking it to lightning, depending on how it was done, might make lightning shoot out from the seal instead of fire. Linking it to speed might make the explosion occur faster. Or, it might make everyone near the seal when it went off move quickly for a few seconds. Such was the theory I developed, at least. I did not have many linked seals to study, so I was fairly shaky on how they actually interacted.

I'd idly considered if this was how sealing worked in canon, but after thinking about it I decided that was an almost nonsensical question. Kishimoto probably hadn't bothered to figure out how fūinjutsu would work and just used it however the story needed.

I tried applying what I'd learned to storage seals and was fairly successful. I almost started with exploding tags as they were simpler, but caution won out in the end. While all seals could be deadly if you messed them up significantly, explosive tags could kill you even if you got everything right but made a miscalculation on the trigger or size. I was able to make storage seals with varying capacities, and others that spit out their contents after a certain time had elapsed. That had some interesting possible applications.

By the time I was ten I was comfortable with pretty much every iteration of storage seals and explosive tags. I began to practice some of the more complicated basic seals, like knockout tags and chakra-sapping seals. At the same time, I thought I was ready to try creating a seal of my own. It was not hard to pick what I needed. I had spent more and more time devoted to my studies of sealing, and my other skills, already slipping relative to the other children, had fallen further and further behind. I had slid down the taijutsu ratings until I now sat only half a dozen spots above the bottom.

As it stood, I was in danger of losing my place as the top kunoichi of my class, something that I could not allow.

My academic record was excellent. Flawless, to be specific. That would not be enough though, as physical skills, of which taijutsu was considered the most important, comprised a large portion of our marks. The answer was clear: I needed to make a seal that would help me in fisticuffs. Even leaving aside the issue of assuring team assignments, as it stood I was screwed the minute an enemy got close. I had eventual plans for a technique that would eliminate that problem, but it would likely take me years to learn.

I looked through my big book of seals, into which I had copied every seal I had come across in the past two years. While I now understood many aspects of sealing, I still could not invent seals out of whole cloth. I understood the rules of the language, but that did not mean I knew all the possible words. I could probably create some seals with trial and error, by sticking together some kanji I knew with some affixes I had figured out, but the chances of me actually achieving the desired effect were pretty low. Besides, seal experimentation was notoriously dangerous, even for relatively small variations on a known seal. Placing random effects together would likely have fatally disastrous results.

My eyes caught on one of the seals taken from the book that had started all this. Based around the kanji for speed linked to the kanji for storage, it had been used to create something that approximated the function of a crossbow. A crank was turned against resistance, despite it not being attached to anything. Once it had been cranked, the device could be used to speed up a projectile. The device had not been particularly useful, as the only projectiles it could shoot were ones with parts of the seal inscribed into them, which was a fairly hard thing to accomplish using medieval technology. Additionally the projectiles, while flying much faster than normal, didn't actually hit any harder. Still, the basic idea of storing speed for later usage was one I could work with.

I developed a set of bands, two of which would go on my wrists, two on my ankles, and one on my forehead. The bands on my limbs would provide resistance, acting like training weights, something I had been meaning to get anyway. As I went about my day they would store up speed, which they could then feed to the band on my forehead, speeding up my whole body. That was the theory, at least. My original idea plan had been simpler, with the bands giving their speed right back where they got it from, but when I had tested that on a stick the results had been…messy. The end of the stick with the band on it had been sped up, but the rest of it had not. The internal stresses had shattered it into kindling.

So I added in the forehead band, which would—in theory—spread the speed around the entire affected object, i.e. my body. It pained me to think about the thing that was being stored as speed rather than force, which would have made far more physical sense, but from the descriptions it seemed like the objects were actually being sped up relative to the rest of the world, not just pushed. When a timed explosive seal had been applied to the projectile, it had gone off much earlier than the timer dictated.

The first time I tested Speed Seal 2.0, the forehead band exploded. Luckily, or rather, conscientiously, I had conducted the test on a bundle of sticks from behind the cover of a nearby ditch. I went over my seals and found a small transcription error in one. I cursed the lack of a compiler, which would have caught that error were this a programming language, and constructed a new band.

The second time I tested it, it exploded again. This time every band exploded. I went back to the drawing board. I did some research in the library and found something called seal instability. Apparently seals of certain shapes when used together became unbalanced and had a tendency to react violently. I rethought, redrew, and rebalanced.

The third test on inanimate objects went smoothly, so I proceeded to the animal testing phase. This was one of the largest modifications I'd had to make to the original seal, allowing it to affect living things, but also a part I was pretty sure of. The parts of a seal that dealt with what it affected had been one of my first areas of focus.

I sneaked out to the butcher shop one night. I knew she kept several pigs caged behind the shop, so her meat would always be as fresh as possible. I had originally planned to go to one of the farms near Konoha, where there were far fewer ninja around who could catch me, but I decided against it. The logistical complications of going somewhere outside the sensing barrier, combined with the fact that if the test ended up being fatal I would prefer it happen to an animal that was going to die anyway, made this a more sensible option. Besides, if I were caught I could always pretend to be committing some juvenile prank involving pigs.

The test proceeded flawlessly. The pig seemed somewhat distressed by the fact that it spent a split second moving many times its normal speed, but the diagnostic jutsu I used on it afterward (the only medical jutsu I'd really been able to master) didn't show any obvious health problems.

Human trials were next. I wished I could use shadow clones, but even if I had access to the forbidden scroll, the chakra requirements were way out of my reach. I considered trying to enlist the aid of someone who could make shadow clones for me to use as test subjects, but I didn't think that would end well. The regulations against seal experimentation were very strict. Besides, most of the people who could use the Kage Bunshin were high-level jōnin, whose time was very valuable. I doubted they would be particularly accommodating for a clanless academy student.

Instead, I enlisted one of the clan-having (Clanned? Clanful?) academy students. Shikamaru was smart enough that he would probably react intelligently to any problems that arose. At the same time, he lacked the inquisitiveness to try to figure out exactly what I was doing. Even if he did, his sense of personal loyalty combined with his aversion for hassle meant he was unlikely to tell anyone.

"So all you need to do is stand over there and, I don't know, watch the clouds or something. Come check on me in a minute or two or if you, uh, hear anything unusual."

"What will you be doing?" he asked.

"Oh, you know. Boring girl things. Makeup and dresses and and the like. Nothing you'd be interested in." My lack of bags made this excuse laughably transparent, but he would probably see through any story I made up anyway so really, why bother?

"That would explain your…interesting…outfit." He grinned mischievously and very deliberately ran his eyes up and down my body. I felt my cheeks flush. I knew he only did it to annoy me, there was no way he'd even hit puberty yet, but it bothered me anyway. Ever since I'd let slip that I was discomfited by the communal baths, Konoha's main hygiene mechanism, he'd gone out of his way to heckle me about my self-consciousness. I knew it was somewhat silly to have body image issues as a relatively pretty, incredibly fit eleven-year-old. Still, a lifetime of media influence and several years of bullying had left me with some hangups that were hard to get over, even if they no longer really applied to the body I wore.

Today I had ditched my customary loose t-shirt and baggy shorts for a skin-tight bodysuit that went down to my knees and elbows. On the scale of outlandish clothing worn by ninja it was barely noteworthy, but it was a big difference from my usual aesthetic. From what I understood of how I'd put together the seal, it would speed up the entire object it was applied to. I didn't think that would affect clothing. I wasn't positive, but from what I'd seen of sealing so far, "one object" would mean one fully contiguous piece of matter. Loose clothing would not count, but a skintight suit should. In theory.

I scowled at Shikamaru but he was, as ever, unfazed. "Didn't your mother ever teach you any manners?"

"Nope. Will your…_boring girl things_…be particularly dangerous?"

"Of course not. You think I'm going to hurt myself doing my makeup? Geez, boys really are clueless." I tried to maintain my stern facade, but a smile slipped out anyway.

"So it's just coincidence you brought us to the training field nearest the hospital?"

"I did? How strange." It was his turn to scowl at me. I let my joking demeanor fade. "Really, Shika, I should be fine."

"How reassuring. I won't try to stop you; I know how hard it is to divert you from something you're set on. Just…be careful, won't you? Hospital trips are so very troublesome."

I nodded and walked over to the other side of the field. I took a few seconds to gather my thought and center myself. I pictured the seal in my mind, visualized the flows of chakra, and, with a thought, activated it.

The world froze around me. Noises became distorted. I felt like I moved at normal speed, but everything else looked as if it moved through molasses. I could count the wingbeats of a bee that was flying past my face.

Sound came back in a rush and the bee sped away. The speedup had lasted maybe half a second, for me. The bee had beat its wings three times, and honeybees usually beat their wings a little over two hundred times a second, so the rest of the world had probably passed somewhere around a sixtieth of a second.

My diagnostic jutsu found nothing out of place. I ran back to Shikamaru with a smile plastered across my face.

"Hahahaha, it worked! Finally." I threw my arms around him and pulled him into a tight hug, giddy with euphoria. He stood there and took it like a log. After couple seconds he spoke.

"Can you tell me now what you were really doing? Or at least let go of me? Most of my life-plans, vague as the are, involve me being able to breathe."

I stepped back from him. "Here, I'll show you. High five!"

He raised his hand tolerantly. I activated the seal, stepped in and high-fived him, breaking my hand in the process.

After we'd visited the hospital and I'd gotten my "sparring injury" taken care of, I explained my sealing exploits to Shikamaru. He had blithely gone along with my story of a training accident. If he were going to tattle about me experimenting, that would have probably been the time to do it. My kinder side thought he deserved an explanation. My more manipulative side thought that a show of trust now would bind him more tightly to me, making it less likely that he would later speak up.

"Hmmm, I wonder if moving thirty times normal speed makes things hit you thirty times harder? Maybe if you—"

"That's all you have to say? No rebuke about dangerous testing?"

"Nah, way too troublesome. You're OK aren't you? Mostly? Now, when…"

We discussed how to safely assess the limits of the seal. Shika declared the whole thing too much trouble for him to do himself, but agreed to be nearby and watch for danger while I ran the tests. I soon found out his theory was correct: everything affected me much more while it was active. A soft push could send me flying, and a light tap would give me bruises. The effect I had on things was likewise diminished; with it active I had difficulty rolling a five-pound ball. That limited its effectiveness somewhat, but it would still be useful for dodging and setting up strikes, so long as I deactivated it in time.

I found that wearing normal clothing greatly decreased the speed I achieved, and trying to carry anything made it fail altogether. Whether or not I wore the bodysuit didn't seem to make a difference (now there was a test that I did _not_ get Shika's help with).

I bought a large cloak and removed the clasp. I held it together with a small, constant chakra stream. When I activated the seal, the cloak hung in the air around me. When I stopped the chakra stream there was nothing holding it to me and I was free to move. Pushing away the corners of the cloak, where it hung around my neck, slowed me slightly but not enough to be a hindrance. The cloak itself was an excellent carrier for seals, and I covered it with storage seals and strengthening seals. I also incorporated some chakra draining seals and knockout tags, in case I was ever able to wrap the cloak around my opponent.

By the time I was done testing the speed seal (which really needed a snappier name) and incorporating it into my fighting style, it was almost time for graduation. I would soon be thrust into a dangerous world full of incredibly powerful people.

I did not feel ready. I doubted I ever would.

I had my seals, my mind, and my foreknowledge. It didn't seem like nearly enough, but it would have to do. The temptation to run away and let someone else deal with all this was still there, but it had lessened every year. I was committed now. This was my life.

The wolves would soon be at the door, and I was determined that when they arrived they would find a house made of bricks, not straw.

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><p><em>The world. It builds. I had intended to talk about relationships (in the non-amorous sense) this chapter, but the jutsu explanation stretched a lot longer than I expected, so that's been pushed to next chapter.<em>

_My spellchecker's dictionary somehow has agglutinative in it, but not polysynthetic._

_The story actually starts next chapter! I'm so excited. Now, I know what you're all wondering: "Has it got any sports in it?" Just you wait. It has fencing. Fighting. Torture. Poison. True love. Hate. Revenge. Giants. Hunters. Bad men. Good men. Beautifulest ladies. Snakes. Spiders. Beasts of all natures and descriptions. Pain. Death. Brave men. Coward men. Strongest men. Chases. Escapes. Lies. Truths. Passion. Miracles. Also, baseball._


	6. Chapter 6: Test

**On The Next Chapter: **I'm going to have a while where I won't be able to write much, so the next chapter might not come for a couple weeks.

**Disclaimer: **Not all that glitters is Kishimoto.

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><p><strong>Chapter 6: <strong>This Is Not a Test

After so many years of preparation, the graduation test had finally arrived.

The written portion was trivial. It was a combination of history and geography, which I had studied extensively, along with basic tactics, the majority of which seemed like common sense.

I mused on the effects of genetics as we did the throwing test. I must have spent well over a thousand hours of practice on throwing weapons over the years. I can say with confidence that my aim was better than that of any twelve-year-old on Earth, by a wide margin. I could hit an unmoving target the size of my fist at thirty meters with a kunai, nine times out of ten.

I barely passed the test. While I could hit a fist, many of my peers could hit a bullseye. It seemed a tad unfair. I knew that none of them (with the possible exception of Sasuke) had trained as hard as I had, and even he had started years after me. Still, this was the premier class. We were the twenty-seven kids deemed most likely to be able to succeed on the jōnin track (well, twenty-six and Naruto, who was deemed most likely to have an incredibly powerful demon in his stomach). It was not that surprising that they were capable of superhuman feats, even young and relatively untrained.

I had wondered for years why my body was so inferior to theirs. Canon Ami had made it into the class on her own merits, so why was I so much worse, even after all I'd put myself through? My working hypothesis had been that my displaced psyche did not mesh with my new body in some way. Chakra was thought to come, at least partially, from the soul (I had never believed in souls before, but there did seem to be hard evidence for their existence in the Narutoverse, so I was reserving judgment until I could investigate further). If my soul did not mesh properly with this body, that might explain my pitiful chakra reserves and poor motor control (relative to my class-mates; I was fairly average for a shinobi of my age in most respects).

A much simpler explanation had revealed itself to me at a family get-together. There, I met Takumi Okada, head of Academy Admissions, and my maternal uncle. I vaguely remembered meeting him at my entrance exam, but that had been our first encounter. Mom had become estranged from her family shortly after my birth. She never spoke about it, but I suspected my difficulties as an infant had been at the center of it. The shinobi world was not kind to invalids or the simple. Years later, she had finally been able to forgive them (and they her; when it comes to family quarrels no one is ever left entirely unblamed), so I had finally met my uncle for real.

He was a kind man who seemed to love children desperately, despite his own conspicuous lack. I could easily see a world where his niece, untroubled by the difficulties I'd had, had become like a daughter to him. Could imagine how, when it came time for her to test for the academy, he had overlooked her obvious shortcomings, seeing not the child she was, but the child he wished her to be. Could hear her parents being so happy for her, pushing her to succeed and make friends. Could picture how her joy at being told she was special had turned to bitterness when she realized she wasn't. Could envision her turning her group of friends into a gang of bullies, to pull down her peers outside the classroom, where they towered above her.

It was a sad story, and one that I was glad had not been retold. My original hypothesis was still possible, but this one seemed much more likely. No matter the reason, it was something I could work around. I had only marginally passed the ranged portion of the test and I would need to excel at the rest to keep my spot at the top.

Taijutsu was next. I dodged and feinted against my larger and stronger opponent, careful to show off my textbook-perfect academy style. The chunin I was matched against was clearly holding back at first, giving me a chance to display my abilities. He ramped up the intensity as we fought until I was barely keeping up, only saved by the judicious use of my speed seal. He stepped in and sent a punch towards my midsection that nearly caught me anyway.

I slid past his arm as the world slowed, his knuckles lightly brushing my hip. The multiplied force of the blow threw me into a spin. If I slowed down while still off-balance like this I was done for sure. As I spun, I channeled a bit of chakra into my foot and threw myself into a forward flip. As I did so, I released the small stream of chakra I had been maintaining that stuck a bit of paper to my left forearm.

Time returned to normal and found me spinning upside down, head a few inches above my opponent's shoulder. My fingers closed around the explosive tag I'd released and I slapped it onto the shoulder of the chunin as I passed, sending a bit of chakra into it to stick it to his uniform. I landed and scrambled away, hands forming the snake seal. The chunin's eyes widened as he noticed the tag and he froze, hands open and spread wide in the universal sign of non-aggression.

I felt a flush of satisfaction as I was declared the winner. There was no way I could have won if he had been fighting seriously, or if he hadn't underestimated me, but still. It was quite rare for prospective genin to win their spars. Sasuke might, depending on who he was matched against, but no one else in our class had a hope in hell. The bonus from this would go a long way towards offsetting my previous taijutsu marks, which had been lackluster until very recently.

The use of an explosive tag skirted the edge of legality, but I had read the regulations for the test very carefully. While weapons were explicitly banned, all other "ninja tools" were allowed, which was technically how seals were classed, regardless of their offensive potential.

The jutsu test was all that remained. I was not at all worried about it, with good reason. I had practiced the academy jutsu endlessly. They were incredibly useful, though not as much as I had originally hoped. The jutsu as described and occasionally shown in the manga were, for lack of a better word, incredibly broken. They were unbelievably versatile and the only reason they weren't used to decide every fight in the manga was Kishimoto's lack of imagination (and, I suppose, that that would've made for a fairly boring manga). Unfortunately, in the version of the Narutoverse I lived in they had large limitations.

Canon Kawirimi let you instantly switch places with any other object. I had hoped to be able to use it to swap places with my enemies and leave them on piles of explosive tags. Or, if that proved impossible, to swap places with a log covered in piles of explosive tags when my enemies got close to me. Or to swap in my enemies right before an attack hit me, so they would be hit instead. Or to swap in my allies right as they completed attacks, to hit unsuspecting opponents. Or to jump back and forth between objects, avoiding every possible attack. The possibilities were vast. Unfortunately, it was not to be.

When I learned the Kawirimi in the Academy, it had three main drawbacks. The first was that the swap had to be with something of approximately your mass. The larger the difference, the more chakra it took, and the longer it took. The second was that nothing with chakra could be swapped. No ninja, no seals, no clones. The third was how long it took. Some ninja theorized that the delay was only because of the difference in mass and that if you could find something of exactly the same mass as you it would be instantaneous. The delay could be reduced with practice, but for most genin swapping with an object more than a few pounds away from their weight, it would be faster to run the distance.

Canon Bunshin created visually identical copies of you that couldn't physically interact with the world, beyond reflecting light. It had not been changed that much. The only difference I'd noticed was that whereas in canon it took a few hits, or one solid hit, to get rid of it, it could now be dispelled by the slightest contact. That invalidated a few of my ideas, like having them wrap themselves around my opponent's eyes to block their vision. I still had ideas, but they were somewhat more constrained.

Which brings us to the Henge. Canon Henge let you transform into anything, living or inanimate. The lack of abuse of the Henge was one of the gravest sins of Naruto's characters. The things they could have done with it… Throwing an ally Henged as a kunai or shuriken was done a few times in the manga, but it should have been one of the main strategies of every team. No ninja should have ever been caught on an infiltration mission, when they could Henge into a pebble, or a piece of sand, or a drift seed, or any number of small things. No ninja should have been hit by a technique when they could just Henge into a blade of grass to dodge it. Or Henge into a lighter version of themselves to move faster. No ninja should have ever walked anywhere when they could Henge into a bird and fly. Or do…so very, very many things. The possibilities were almost endless. Jiraiya henged into _air_ at one point. It boggled the mind how little it was used in canon.

Unfortunately for me, the world I lived in was more consistent. The more a form differed from your own, the more chakra it took, and the longer it took to perform. Henging into another person, assuming they were around your size, was fairly easy, thought it still took several seconds. Henging into an inanimate object was not something most ninja could pull off. On top of that, you ended up with the sensory apparatuses of the form you assumed. As a plant or rock all you could do was count to yourself how long you'd been in that form and hope you reverted at the right time. It was still incredibly useful, but was very hard to pull off and was reserved mostly for non-combat situations.

All that aside, the jutsu were still incredibly useful, if somewhat less so than I had hoped. I had practiced them until I was fairly proficient. I was by no means a master: I still needed all the seals, I could not avoid creating smoke when I did them, and they still took me a while to perform. Still, every time I tried I was successful, which is all we were being tested on today.

Once I was done I waited outside the academy for Naruto. I didn't put on my hitai-ite, and I wouldn't until I had a chance to inscribe the speed seal on its inward-facing side. Shikamaru was lying on a nearby hill, using his hitai-ite as a pillow, eyes towards the sky. I walked over to join him.

"You actually showed up. Guess I owe Hinata 50 ryō"

He scowled at me. "Really? I thought you were smarter than that. There was no way I would miss the test; Mom would've never let me hear the end of it."

We traded a few more quips before lapsing into a comfortable silence. This was one of the things I liked about Shikamaru: unlike most people, especially children, he did not fear silence. Whereas many people chattered inanely, as if they had a word quota to meet, my conversations with Shika were frequently punctuated by periods of quiet, which I usually spent thinking and he spent somewhere on the spectrum between thinking and sleeping. As if he could hear my thoughts and sought to prove me wrong, he spoke.

"Who are you waiting for, anyway?"

"Naruto. I want to see if he passes. If he does, I'll probably take him somewhere to celebrate."

"Why? You don't like him." Blunt as ever, Shika.

"That's not true. I just don't particularly like _spending time_ with him. There's a distinction. Still, he will almost certainly be on my team. Intra-team relations will be much nicer if he thinks of us as friends, not just teammates that were stuck together."

"Almost certainly teammates, huh? Someone's a little cocky."

"Some of us actually put effort into things. You should try it sometime. It really helps with knowing you succeeded afterward."

He smiled lazily. "Don't change the subject. You started befriending him long before team assignments were a foregone conclusion. I understand why you courted the rest of us, clan shinobi and all—"

"Courted nine people at once? What kind of girl do you take me for?"

"You know what I mean. And Sakura kind of comes as a package deal with Ino," he continued as if I hadn't interrupted, "but why Naruto? He's troublesome and has no special skills that I'm aware of. And don't say it was for team assignments you've been predicting since we were six. Even if that were true, we both know the help you've given him over the years is the only reason he even has a chance of passing today. What do you know that I don't?"

Well, this was interesting. A natural consequence of the curiosity and drive I'd worked hard to engender in him for years. I was happy that he was taking an interest, but somewhat less happy that he was asking me about s-ranked secrets.

"Couldn't I just have been friendly?"

"You? I don't think so. I've barely seen you exchange five words with any child not of the aforementioned nine. I'm not sure I've ever seen you do something that didn't advance your interests in at least one way, often several. You seem to be always making plans, an impression not helped by those encoded notebooks you're constantly scribbling in. Forgive me if I won't attribute your actions to childish whimsy."

Well now, this was _very_ interesting. I didn't think he'd been paying that much attention to me, but I guess I shouldn't be that surprised. We had spent a lot of time together. I had intended to devote most of my socializing time to Naruto and Sasuke, but they were really hard to be around. Naruto was annoying and childish, while Sasuke was cold and harsh. I had ended up spending most of my free time on Shikamaru and Hinata, people I actually enjoyed talking to. After all that time I should probably have expected him to have a pretty good idea of me. I had never really tried to hide my ulterior motives from him and, no matter how he acted, he _was_ a genius.

"Thanks for that oh-so-flattering character dissection. I think that Naruto will surprise you. I think he has hidden potential, both in his personality and from…outside factors. I can't tell you specifics." He opened his mouth to protest, but I cut him off. "Not won't, _can't_. This is an s-ranked secret. That's all I'm allowed to tell you. Still, you're a smart boy. I'm sure you'll be able to figure it out if you try."

He gave me a dirty look before turning his eyes back to the clouds.

"Why ask now, anyway? This is something you've probably wondered about for a while."

"Well, we're ninja of Konoha now, aren't we? Loyalty to the village and all that." He puffed out his chest and straightened his shoulders in an exaggerated fashion, an effect somewhat spoiled by his horizontality. "Couldn't have a kunoichi of questionable motivation running around. Who knows what kind of trouble she might get into?"

I was about to retort when I heard a squeal of delight. I turned just in time to get a faceful of blond hair as Ino hugged me.

"We did it, Ami! Ninja at last!" She turned to Shikamaru. "Oh, you passed too. _Great_."

"Try to sound a little more enthused, why don't you. I'm probably going to be on your team, you know."

She stuck her tongue out at him. "Yeah, but I don't have to like it. Between you and Chouji all our team is ever going to do is eat and sleep." She turned back to face me. "What about you, Ami, who do you think you'll be teamed with?"

We spent some time speculating on team possibilities. Well, she speculated. I was almost positive who would be on the three teams that mattered. I felt a little guilty about sidelining Sakura, but there would always be next year for her. From a certain perspective, I would be saving her from a lot of pain and hardship.

Sasuke came out of the Academy not too long after Ino had. He took one look at Ino's girlish exuberance and walked the other way. I almost went after him but, as was so often the case these days, I didn't know what I would say.

A few minutes later we heard a commotion from inside. A minute after that, Naruto emerged, hitai-ite pinned proudly (and crookedly) across his forehead. He ran over to us, practically bouncing with excitement.

"You were right, Ami! All I had to do was make a bunch of them! Man, you should've seen their faces, dattebayo! It was great!" He looked around. "Where'd Sakura go? I wanna show her my hitai."

I stifled a laugh as Shika muttered under his breath that it was clear Naruto wanted to show her something, but it probably wasn't his hitai.

"She had a family get-together," I said, giving Shika a swift kick in the side. "Anyway, I was thinking we should go for a celebration dinner. What do you three think?"

Naruto practically tripped over himself in his haste to say yes. Shika grunted something that I chose to interpret as a yes. Ino looked between me and Naruto, wrinkling her nose at the fox-boy. It would probably not be that much fun to have the two of them together, but I really did need to start integrating Naruto into the main social circle. I had made overtures before, but hadn't had much success. I'd put it off, telling myself I had lots of time. That was no longer true.

"Please, Ino? We can go—"I suppressed a shudder"—_shopping_ afterward."

She narrowed her eyes. "What _kind_ of shopping?"

Honestly, you divert one "shopping" trip to go to the bookstore and they never let you live it down. "Your choice."

"Oh, okay then. What are we waiting for?"

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><p><em>Sorry to have another chapter full of exposition. I've been experimenting with switching between exposition and real-time but I don't think I got the balance quite right here. This was the last time-skip for a while though; the next…number between 2 and 50…chapters will be day-by-day or week-by-week, so things should pick up.<em>

_I don't mean to disparage Kishimoto. It's just a case of an author coming up with some ideas that seem cool to them without really thinking through all the possibilities they open. Happens all the time. That being said, the Henge is a pretty egregious example. It seems like Kishimoto conceived it as being mainly a visual thing, as it's pretty much only used in the manga for deception, but then he went ahead and said that a transformed shinobi was indistinguishable from the genuine article, which was just too much. Shoutout to MaleficentRace for bringing this up in a review. I was already going to have this segment, but he/she gave me some examples I didn't know about, like the turning into air thing._


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